I am becoming increasingly distraught at the hostile turn the debate over healthcare reform has taken. The tactics employed by conservative opponents of late could be generously described as unethical. It’s difficult to address the issue without succumbing to temptations to lower one’s self to the abysmal standards set by the opponents of reform. I strongly dislike using partisan terms, but the distastefulness has come almost entirely from one side of the aisle, the side with whom I once proudly aligned myself but with which I have grown increasingly disenchanted over the past several years.
The falsehoods spreading in regards to universal healthcare are staggering, and I make no claims of addressing them all here. Instead, this is just a sampling of misrepresentations and misinformation skewing facts in the healthcare debate.
The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!
From the Investor’s Business Daily:
“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”
“I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”
One popular method of damaging healthcare reform is comparing it to England’s National Health Service (NHS) – a plan Obama is not copying. We hear continual horror stories about the NHS from conservative-backed sources like Forbes, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal. British citizens, however, have taken notice and have started to push back as evident in the following links.
- Telegraph: British experts defend NHS against US Right-wing attacks
- Telegraph: How US Right-wing claims about NHS have been answered
- Telegraph: Gordon and Sarah Brown join US pro-NHS Twitter campaign
- Washington Post: Health-Reform Rhetoric Gets Personal for Britons
More than a million British citizens have surged upon Twitter to voice their support for their NHS. You can also read responses to some of the lies about the NHS at the Guardian, and they have also posted a handy Google Docs spreadsheet comparing some points of reference between UK’s healthcare system and systems in other countries.
Simply put, Obama and the Democratic congress are not planning on aping the NHS, but, even if they were, Britain’s healthcare system is not the nightmare our press has portrayed it to be. Yes, you can find individuals who have had bad experiences, but that is true of anything.
They’re Out to Kill Your Favorite Disadvantaged Demographic
On her Facebook page, Sarah Palin wrote:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of healthcare. Such a system is downright evil.
This is a variation of the NHS fear-mongering without specifically referencing the other system. It’s also disingenuous. She fails to point to any language in the proposed bill to support her claim, as she has failed to do in subsequent arguments. There is nothing in the bill regarding end-of-life counseling for parents of disabled children, and, as Stephen Hawking exemplifies, severely disabled individuals can thrive under public health plans.
As Darren Hutchison points out, yes, sect. 1233 of the proposed healthcare bill offers compensation to doctors who provide end-of-life counseling that includes hospice care, healthcare proxies, palliative care, and other related issues. He goes on to point out that the AMA endorses such practices, and the group’s president-elect Cecil Wilson says this opposition is “one of the more egregious examples of mischaracterization that I have seen.”
The issue even has Republicans contradicting themselves. For example, praising a hospital in Wisconsin, Newt Gingrich said:
More than 20 percent of all Medicare spending occurs in the last two months of life. Gundersen Lutheran Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin has developed a successful end-of-life, best practice that combines: 1) community-wide advance care planning…; 2) hospice and palliative care; and 3) coordination of services through an electronic medical record…If Gundersen’s approach was used to care for the approximately 4.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who die every year, Medicare could save more than $33 billion a year.
Later, Gingrich condemned such practices on This Week With George Stephanopolous. Of course, he sets his argument up as the government running the end-of-life counseling when, in fact, the counseling would come from private practices. A public plan would just be in place to help individuals pay for the service. This underlines the basic falshood behind the conservative oppositions: the government will be making decisions rather than doctors and patients. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A Collection of Other Untrue “Facts”
- Will we be forced to sign up for the public option? No. In fact the plan may improve private offerings and create a marketplace for comparing and selecting private plans.
- Will public health care make abortions free? No. According to the 1976 Hyde amendment, public money cannot be used for abortions. Under the current bill, only private plans can cover abortions.
- Did Rep. Pence (R-IN) say that Democrats voted down an amendment that would require them to enroll in their own plan? Yup, he said that, and he was wrong.
- Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) says the public plan will be closed to people with disabilities. Is this true? No.
- Is it true the bill will introduce school-based clinics that will provide abortions? No. Nothing like that is in the bill.
- But the bill is over 1000 pages! Yes, this statement seems to imply that there is no way to know what’s in a document that long. Guess what? The Bible is over 1000 pages, and I know the Footprints in the Sand poem is not in it.
- Wait, don’t some of the criticisms levied against the public option already exist in private plans (bureaucrat between patient and doctor, rationing of care, discrimination against age/conditions, etc.)? Yup.
Finishing Up and Additional Reading
Like abortion, conservation, and militarization, I don’t view healthcare as a political issue so much as a moral and humanitarian one. Unfortunately, politicization of anything is all but inevitable in our current culture. It’s a sad commentary on our political system and the media surrounding it that such lies can filter through unchallenged. In some cases, media individuals have even been encouraging the dishonesty. It’s even sadder that I see see fellow Christians passing these lies along without bothering to check the information. Healthy debate is possible without the regrettable hostility and dishonesty we’ve been seeing in town halls around the country, websites, and editorial programs. We are a society of civilized people. I’d like to see us start acting like it.
Here are some follow-up links for more information:
