The Republican approach to healthcare reform: My kid has a broken arm? That can wait.

Here's a rather telling—and terrifying—glimpse into the mind of a Republican thinking about health insurance and health care reform. 

The example Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) gave in an interview with MLive.com was from his own experience when he waited until the morning after to take his youngest son to the doctor with an injured arm, because he did not want to waste money on an expensive emergency room visit. The arm, it turned out, was broken.

"We weren't sure what was going on. It was in the evening, so I splinted it up and we wrapped it up, and the decision was, okay, do we go to the ER? We thought it was a sprain, but weren't sure," Huizenga said, adding that he and his wife "took every precaution and decided to go in the next morning."

Okay, we'll stop there for a second. He made his youngest son suffer overnight with a broken arm—and he must have had a clue that it was broken since he splinted it—rather than go to the ER. His child. With a broken arm. We continue.

He offered the example to explain his view that health care consumers should shoulder more of the financial responsibilities, instead of the current health system, which he said "continue[s] to squeeze providers." […]

"Way too often, people pull out their insurance card and they say 'I don't know the difference or cost between an X-ray or an MRI or CT Scan.' I might make a little different decision if I did know [what] some of those costs were and those costs came back to me," he said.

Yes, he was doing the fiscally prudent—even virtuous—thing by refusing to have his kid's broken limb seen to immediately (leading to who knows how much in future therapist bills for the kid to resolve that trauma.) Set aside the horrifying glimpse this provides into Huizenga's family life—he's falling back on that old "personal responsibility" bullshit Republicans love so much that says the whole reason health care costs so much is because people use it. So who has to be punished in this scenario? The patient.