John McCain released his health records to a selected group of reporters today. Well, he didn’t exactly release them. He gave them three hours to review 1,173 pages of medical records, which they weren’t allowed to copy.
If you do the math, that means they had to review six and a half pages a minute, or one every 9.2 seconds. That might give you eight seconds a page when you subtract the time it takes to turn them.
I have to review medical records quite often. I represent people in disability cases, so it’s part of my job. I probably have more familiarity with medical records than most reporters, and I freely admit that most of the time I don’t know what I’m looking at. One thing’s for sure, I’m incapable of reviewing 6.5 pages a minute.
It would be interesting to know (we are not told) whether the AP reporter that was privileged to review the records (we are not told about the selection criteria) was a doctor, or allowed to bring a doctor to interpret these records.
No story about an old Republican’s medical records would be complete without a testimonial from his doctor telling us that he’s not just healthy; he is, in fact, superhuman:
But Mayo internist Dr. John Eckstein, his longtime personal physician, lauded McCain’s performance on a heart stress test — sweating it out for 10 minutes when Eckstein routinely sees patients decades younger quit at five or seven minutes.
“I think physiologically he is considerably younger than his chronologic age based on his cardiovascular fitness,” Eckstein said in an interview Thursday. “I got a call from the cardiologist who said that he had not seen anyone that age exercise for that long in a long time.”
Indeed, he probably does see people who crap out after five minutes. He deals with sick people all the time. This quote is reminiscent of the stuff we heard about Ronald Reagan, weightlifter, who also was an elderly gentleman of superhuman Republican strength. We didn’t get confirmation of his creeping dementia until after he was safely out of the White House, though it was pretty obvious for those of us with eyes to see.
I have no idea if John McCain is healthy or not. But I submit that a three hour review of over a thousand pages of medical records by a handpicked reporter, followed by a meaningless but flattering sound bite from his doctor (who may be a tad self interested) tells us nothing. I further submit that if this reporter was unaccompanied by a doctor that he or she had no way of knowing what to look for. How hard would it be for the McCain staff to put the stuff they wanted up near the top (making it so much easier for the reporter), so the McCain loving press would report in accordance with the “McCain as fit as a fiddle” narrative, particularly if the handpicked reporter was among the legion of McCain worshippers in the national press?
If McCain was being truly forthcoming, he would have allowed copying, so the records could be reviewed by experts. We are no more informed today than we were yesterday, but because this is McCain we will hear no more on this subject. This empty gesture, which the press would scorn coming from anyone else, will likely be considered sufficient, and the medical records story will go the way of the Hagee story, and the Cindy’s tax return story, and the can’t tell a Sunni from a Shiite story, and all the other stories that belie the McCain myth.
This method of “disclosure” by the way, is a tried and true method of information control. If you’ve ever been an elected official you know what I’m talking about. Staff gives you a huge quantity of information prior to a meeting-so much information, presented so haphazardly, with so little time to absorb it, that it is essentially meaningless. But you can’t complain, because it’s all there somewhere. At least in those instances you get a hard copy.
Update: More informed comment here.
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