No Health Insurance Is Hard. No Phone? Unthinkable.

As the health care debate thundered away in Washington, Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) stirred up a social media squall by suggesting that uninsured Americans should invest in their own health care “rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love.”

In Chaffetz’s solidly Republican district, one of those uninsured Americans watched the viral CNN interview on — what else? — her cellphone. Not a new iPhone, though, but a Samsung with a cracked screen, one that Shari Hunter and her husband, Anthony, bought with their tax refunds two years ago. “An iPhone and insurance are not the same thing at all,” Hunter said. “If you need to be able to decide between an iPhone and health insurance, you need to look at: Why is that the choice?” To Chaffetz’s supporters, his comments sounded like a tough-love defense of individual responsibility in the midst of a knockdown debate over the government’s role in providing health care to Americans. To his critics, they sounded like a callous and obtuse dismissal of the hard choices that struggling families face every day — and one that echoed earlier, racially noxious arguments over “welfare queens” and criticisms of programs that helped provide phone service to poor people.