Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate
Immortalist
2. No chemo for older Medicare patients.
3. Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance.
4. Death panels will decide who lives.
5. The government will set doctors' wages.
----------------------------------
To the credit of opponents of health-care reform, the lies and
exaggerations they're spreading are not made up out of whole cloth—
which makes the misinformation that much more credible. Instead,
because opponents demand that everyone within earshot (or e-mail
range) look, say, "at page 425 of the House bill!," the lies take on a
patina of credibility. Take the claim in one chain e-mail that the
government will have electronic access to everyone's bank account,
implying that the Feds will rob you blind. The 1,017-page bill passed
by the House Ways and Means Committee does call for electronic fund
transfers—but from insurers to doctors and other providers. There is
zero provision to include patients in any such system. Five other
myths that won't die:
1. You'll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.
The myth that a "health choices commissioner" will decide what
benefits you get seems to have originated in a July 19 post at
blog.flecksoflife.com, whose homepage features an image of Obama
looking like Heath Ledger's Joker. In fact, the House bill sets up a
health-care exchange—essentially a list of private insurers and one
government plan—where people who do not have health insurance through
their employer or some other source (including small businesses) can
shop for a plan, much as seniors shop for a drug plan under Medicare
part D. The government will indeed require that participating plans
not refuse people with preexisting conditions and offer at least
minimum coverage, just as it does now with employer-provided insurance
plans and part D. The requirements will be floors, not ceilings,
however, in that the feds will have no say in how generous private
insurance can be.
2. No chemo for older Medicare patients.
The threat that Medicare will give cancer patients over 70 only end-of-
life counseling and not chemotherapy—as a nurse at a hospital told a
roomful of chemo patients, including the uncle of a NEWSWEEK reporter—
has zero basis in fact. It's just a vicious form of the rationing
scare. The House bill does not use the word "ration." Nor does it call
for cost-effectiveness research, much less implementation—the idea
that "it isn't cost-effective to give a 90-year-old a hip
replacement."
The general claim that care will be rationed under health-care reform
is less a lie and more of a non-disprovable projection (as is Howard
Dean's assertion that health-care reform will not lead to rationing,
ever). What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the
current system, by both Medicare and private insurance. No plan covers
everything, but coverage decisions "are now made in opaque ways by
insurance companies," says Dr. Donald Berwick of the Institute for
Healthcare Improvement.
A related myth is that health-care reform will be financed through
$500 billion in Medicare cuts. This refers to proposed decreases in
Medicare increases. That is, spending is on track to reach $803
billion in 2019 from today's $422 billion, and that would be dialed
back. Even the $560 billion in reductions (which would be spread over
10 years and come from reducing payments to private Medicare advantage
plans, reducing annual increases in payments to hospitals and other
providers, and improving care so seniors are not readmitted to a
hospital) is misleading: the House bill also gives Medicare $340
billion more over a decade. The money would pay docs more for office
visits, eliminate copays and deductibles for preventive care, and help
close the "doughnut hole" in the Medicare drug benefit, explains
Medicare expert Tricia Neuman of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
3. Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance.
The House bill doesn't give anyone free health care (though under a
1986 law illegals who can't pay do get free emergency care now,
courtesy of all us premium paying customers or of hospitals that have
to eat the cost). Will they be eligible for subsidies to buy health
insurance? The House bill says that "individuals who are not lawfully
present in the United States" will not be allowed to receive
subsidies.
The claim that taxpayers will wind up subsidizing health insurance for
illegal immigrants has its origins in the defeat of an amendment,
offered in July by Republican Rep. Dean Heller of Nevada, to require
those enrolling in a public plan or seeking subsidies to purchase
private insurance to have their citizenship verified. Flecksoflife.com
claimed on July 19 that "HC [health care] will be provided 2 all non
US citizens, illegal or otherwise." Rep. Steve King of Iowa spread the
claim in a USA Today op-ed on Aug. 20, calling the explicit
prohibition on such coverage "functionally meaningless" absent
mandatory citizenship checks, and it's now gone viral. Can we say that
none of the estimated 11.9 million illegal immigrants will ever wangle
insurance subsidies through identity fraud, pretending to be a
citizen? You can't prove a negative, but experts say that Medicare—the
closest thing to the proposals in the House bill—has no such problem.
4. Death panels will decide who lives.
On July 16 Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York
and darling of the right, said on Fred Thompson's radio show that "on
page 425," "Congress would make it mandatory…that every five years,
people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell
them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition." Sarah
Palin coined "death panels" in an Aug. 7 Facebook post.
This lie springs from a provision in the House bill to have Medicare
cover optional counseling on end-of-life care for any senior who
requests it. This means that any patient, terminally ill or not, can
request a special consultation with his or her physician about
ventilators, feeding tubes, and other measures. Thus the House bill
expands Medicare coverage, but without forcing anyone into end-of-life
counseling.
The death-panels claim nevertheless got a new lease on life when Jim
Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives
under George W. Bush, claimed in an Aug. 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed
that a 1997 workbook from the Department of Veterans Affairs pushes
vets to "hurry up and die." In fact, the thrust of the 51-page book,
which the VA pulled from circulation in 2007, is letting "loved ones"
and "health care providers" "know your wishes." Readers are asked to
decide what they believe, including that "life is sacred and has
meaning, no matter what its quality," and that "my life should be
prolonged as long as it can...using any means possible." But the
workbook also asks if readers "believe there are some situations in
which I would not want treatments to keep me alive." Opponents of
health-care reform have selectively cited this passage as evidence the
government wants to kill the old and the sick.
5. The government will set doctors' wages.
This, too, seems to have originated on the Flecksoflife blog on July
19. But while page 127 of the House bill says that physicians who
choose to accept patients in the public insurance plan would receive 5
percent more than Medicare pays for a given service, doctors can
refuse to accept such patients, and, even if they participate in a
public plan, they are not salaried employees of it any more than your
doctor today is an employee of, say, Aetna. "Nobody is saying we want
the doctors working for the government; that's completely false," says
Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy
School of Government.
To be sure, there are also honest and principled objections to health-
care reform. Some oppose a requirement that everyone have health
insurance as an erosion of individual liberty. That's a debatable
position, but an honest one. And many are simply scared out of their
wits about what health-care reform will mean for them. But when fear
and loathing hijack the brain, anything becomes believable—even that
health-care reform is unconstitutional. To disprove that, check the
commerce clause: Article I, Section 8.
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
With Katie Connolly, Claudia Kalb, and Ian Yarett
Published Aug 29, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Sep 7, 2009
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/214254
turtoni
> 1. ...no choice in what health benefits you receive.
> 2. No chemo for older Medicare patients.
> 3. Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance.
> 4. Death panels will decide who lives.
> 5. The government will set doctors' wages.
Or:
1. Health care will improve.
2. There will be no tax increases.
3. It will lower the defecit.
4. Health costs will reduce.
5. The government is good at running things.
6. etc,etc,etc.
ZerkonXXXX
> 1. ...no choice in what health benefits you receive.
> 2. No chemo for older Medicare patients. 3. Illegal immigrants will get
> free health insurance.
> 4. Death panels will decide who lives.
> 5. The government will set doctors' wages
6) Medicine will become socialized
ornamentalmind
on earth.
8) People do not die in the US because of the current health care
system.
9) Non-capitalist health care systems in other countries (almost all
of them) just don’t work.
10) People in other countries receive inferior care to those in the US
when it comes to health care.
11) The US doesn’t have socialized medicine.
12) Congress wo/men pay for their own health care.
13) Members of the US military pay for their own health care.
14) A single payer system just doesn’t work/will destroy capitalism/
will cost too much etc.
AZDuffman
> 2. No chemo for older Medicare patients.
> 3. Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance.
> 4. Death panels will decide who lives.
> 5. The government will set doctors' wages.
1. Government can break the laws of economics and give you more
choice, better care, and at less cost than what we have now.
2. "People are dying" because of the current system.
3. The plan will not cover illegal immigrants.
4. Care is better under a single-payer system
5. Other countries have better systems than ours (unless your only
criteria for "better" is "cheaper" in which case the Yugo would have
been the best car around.)
AZDuffman
Why not just state the biggest lie:
"Americans are in favor of a public option and want Obamacare."
Polls show they want neither.
ornamentalmind
One more lie!
turtoni
"PRINCETON, NJ -- Republicans have moved ahead of Democrats by 48% to
44% among registered voters in the latest update on Gallup's generic
congressional ballot for the 2010 House elections, after trailing by
six points in July and two points last month."
http://www.gallup.com/poll/124226/Republicans-Edge-Ahead-Democrats-2010-Vote.aspx
Rod Speed
Irrelevant to those two issues being discussed.
ornamentalmind
>
> Irrelevant to those two issues being discussed.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
True Rod, yet the use of fallacies is but one more use of lies and
propaganda when reality is ignored.
Rod Speed
>>>> AZDuffman <srduffy1...@gmail.com> wrote
>>>>> Immortalist <reanimater_2...@yahoo.com> wrote
>>>>> Why not just state the biggest lie:
>>>>> "Americans are in favor of a public option and want Obamacare."
>>>>> Polls show they want neither.
>>>> One more lie!
>>> "PRINCETON, NJ -- Republicans have moved ahead of Democrats
>>> by 48% to 44% among registered voters in the latest update on
>>> Gallup's generic congressional ballot for the 2010 House elections,
>>> after trailing by six points in July and two points last month."
>>> http://www.gallup.com/poll/124226/Republicans-Edge-Ahead-Democrats-20...
>> Irrelevant to those two issues being discussed.
> True Rod, yet the use of fallacies is but one more use of lies and propaganda when reality is ignored.
Waffle.
turtoni
>
> Irrelevant to those two issues being discussed.
The Republicans are apposed to the public option as presented by the
Democrats and likely the Republican surge in this recent survey is a
indication of the publics feeling on the matter since it is at the
forefront of the political debates. So it is relevant in my opinion.
ornamentalmind
>
> - Show quoted text -
Pancake
Rod Speed
>>>>> Why not just state the biggest lie:
>>>>> "Americans are in favor of a public option and want Obamacare."
>>>>> Polls show they want neither.
>>>> One more lie!
>>> "PRINCETON, NJ -- Republicans have moved ahead of Democrats
>>> by 48% to 44% among registered voters in the latest update on
>>> Gallup's generic congressional ballot for the 2010 House elections,
>>> after trailing by six points in July and two points last month."
>>> http://www.gallup.com/poll/124226/Republicans-Edge-Ahead-Democrats-20...
>> Irrelevant to those two issues being discussed.
> The Republicans are apposed to the public option as presented by the Democrats
Yes.
> and likely the Republican surge in this recent survey
> is a indication of the publics feeling on the matter
You dont know that. For all you know that could just as easily be fools that
are stupid enough to buy the Repug lies on death panels and rationing, fools
that are so stupid that they havent even noted that rationing is rife in the current
system when you cant get insurance because of a pre existing condition.
> since it is at the forefront of the political debates. So it is relevant in my opinion.
What matter much more is explicit polls on those two issues being discussed.
zzbunker
> 7) The US has the best or even one of the top 20 health care systems
> on earth.
> 8) People do not die in the US because of the current health care
> system.
> 9) Non-capitalist health care systems in other countries (almost all
> of them) just don’t work.
> 10) People in other countries receive inferior care to those in the US
> when it comes to health care.
> 11) The US doesn’t have socialized medicine.
The US has always had toe-tag medicine and the way the idiot
legal system is set up, that's all it will ever have. Since
over 50%
of the cost is legal fees to start with.