No, it implies that the editor doesn’t know it’s grammatically correct to place a verb in the present tense in a subordinate clause of a main clause whose own verb is in the past tense. And unless Hawking has died and nobody announced it, in this case it’s also more accurate.
He’s trying to use the subjunctive, with little success.
Yeah yeah. Facts this and truth that.
Your “facts” are not going to save you when Obama’s health care reform mutant dinosaurs start stomping on the hospitals.
Wait, wasn’t Godzilla Japanese? So Obama is outsourcing US health care to the Japanese? Gosh!
I used to live opposite Prof Hawking’s house in Cambridge, he would trundle past our place on the way to his favourite restuarant (local curry house by the Mill Pond, as they were the only eating place nearby that could cook something spicey enough for his tastebuds to register).
A friend of mine (when we were much younger) once asked Prof Hawking if he could say “Supercalifragilisticexpialidoceous” on his voice-synthesizer.
Crazy times.
Really??
is an uninsured grad student at a major American university
‘Pre-existing condition’ also.
This is going to bother me until I know. Did he?
I never used mine, but I’m pretty sure it would have. It was fully paid by the chemistry department, but I never used it* so I don’t know the details. The prescription plan was extra, and had a deductible.
*I’m remembering now that the last time I saw a physician or dentist was before I started grad school. Maybe I should do something about this.
Apparently yes! This was in the mid-80s so the synth took much longer to programme than his current one. Took him most of the afternoon to programme it (in between other conversations), then called my friend back and played it to him.
I have nothing else to add except: Stephen Hawking = 
You know, now I think I understand the meaning of “now I can die in peace.”
By the way, Hawking just received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In fact I think I’ll start a separate thread about that.
Professor Hawking has a retort for the newspaper dweebs and others.
I’d like to hear him say “stuff it” through his synthesizer.
Well, he was almost poached by the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo tlast year… another place in a country with socialized health care (unless you need to see a dentist).
Of course he has a retort. He’s a scientist!
No wait, that’s chemists, not physicists. 
He also has a robotic exoskeleton, at least according to one of my favourite Onion stories.
Yes, I was quite excited when I heard that, and equally disappointed when I found out he wouldn’t be coming after all. It would have been quite a feather in Waterloo’s hat.
I know nothing of mathematics (what I did learn I promptly unlearned), but even I knew that.
How comes people don’t know about the most famous living scientist in the world? And a journalist? Writing about him?
Because even the most famous scientist in the world still isn’t nearly as famous as Paris Hilton. Sad but true.
Because he wasn’t writing about Stephen Hawking. He was making “the abortion point” - “What if Einstein’s mother had aborted him - see abortion is bad because of the unforeseen consequences” - so he needed a person in need of massive health care who is famous and who has unarguably contributed a lot. That list is pretty short. And Hawking has the additional advantage of being able to be substituted in the argument for Einstein (who is pretty commonly used in that argument for reasons beyond me) as all physicists are swappable under the substitution principle of mathematics.
Cleverly put, Dangerosa, and all too true.
If Hawking can survive 40+ years on NHS, he can survive American Health Care.
I knew he was British, lucasian and stuff. I don’t understand a damn thing about what he teaches, though.
Giving Investor’s Business Daily the benefit of the doubt, they might have exactly measured Hawking’s impulse. In that case they could not have known his position.