House Oversight Committee chairman Jason Chaffetz went on CNN Tuesday morning to defend the Republicans' new healthcare plan, which has received a glut of bipartisan criticism since it was unearthed from the basement of Congress less than 24 hours ago."Well, we're getting rid of the individual mandate," the congressman explained on New Day. (For the record, under the proposed American Healthcare Act, you'd still be financially penalized if you allowed your coverage to lapse for too long.) "We're getting rid of those things that people said that they don't want. And you know what? Americans have choices. And they've got to make a choice."The "choice" Americans must make, Chaffetz believes, is simple: "Maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own healthcare. They've got to make those decisions themselves."
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A new iPhone 7 costs between $649 and $969, and Apple generally releases a new version once every year. To put that in perspective, with my current health insurance, my monthly premium and the cost of my medications add up to about $5,500 per year. That doesn't include any doctors visits or emergency care I might need. Unless the average American is buying ten iPhones a year—which would be its own problem—it seems Chaffetz either doesn't know how much healthcare actually costs or was just engaging in some old-fashioned smearing of the poor.Also, as Motherboard's Derek Mead pointed out, for a lot of people without personal computers, smartphones are a necessity, and forcing them to choose between healthcare and internet access is pretty damn cruel.Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.