Many readers are echoing this one:
Using the term "indecent" to categorize the cheering at the most recent debate is dishonest. Watch the video and then tell me when the cheering occured. It was in response to Paul's statement about people being responsible for their own lives and consequences. Is that not a statement that SHOULD be cheered by a true conservative? Only when Blitzer said something about the hypothetical patient dying did some yahoo in the audience shouted "Yeah!", but it was hardly a group response.
Daniel Foster makes related points:
What those people were cheering, either explicitly or implicitly, was the idea that we ought to be responsible for our own actions. That being held to account for our decisions, and not socializing the cost of making bad ones, is the only way to avoid moral hazard. EMTALA is held up as creating a moral hazard in its own right — and it does — but repealing it isn’t the only way to fix it. EMTALA, infamously, doesn’t contain a robust enforcement mechanism. Giving providers better legal recourse to to seek repayment would go a long way toward ensuring that those who have any capacity to pay, do. The true indigents would still be “free-riding”, but these are the people that even a modest social safety net is designed to catch anyway.
The Dish 