Palin kicks the politics of fear and disinformation into high gear – Death Panels?
Posted on 07 August 2009
At her resignation speech in Alaska last month Sarah Palin admonished the media and told them “quit making things up.” I wonder if she will admonish herself?
On her Facebook page today she published a “Statement on the Current health Care Debate” staring out by saying
“As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!
Palin cites economist Thomas Sowell’s statement that the only way to contain costs is to refuse treatment.
“And who will suffer the most when they ration care?” Palin asks. “The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. 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 health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
Rationing is a hot-button word it’s the same thing as utilization review but with more punch. Utilization review is something that any and all healthcare systems must attend to, in fact our lack of utilization review is a large reason that Medicare expense is uncontrollable. Believe it or not Medicare has no annual budget, as a pay for service system – quite literally the more they bill the more they are paid. There is no point at which Medicare stops and says “we’ll be out of money in July let’s start looking at utilization.” Reasonable minds must arrive at the conclusion that any healthcare system be it nationalized or private can no sooner avoid the issue of utilization as they can avoid the issue of costs – so utilization reform is something that will become an integral part of healthcare reform anyway.
Pictures of government bureaucrats forcing euthanasia upon seniors – and now, children with Down syndrome because they’re not productive members of society are not part of any reasonable debate on the facts of the matter – and why is Palin bringing up her Down syndrome son Trig anyway – wasn’t she recently asking members of the media to keep her children out of any and all public debate just last month?
ABC news asked specifically what Palin was referring to when she described the Obama ‘death panel” giving her son Trig a thumbs up or down based on productivity, her spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton responded to ABC news via email “From HR3200 p. 425 see “Advance Care Planning Consultation.”
Death Panels euthanizing seniors and refusing care to children with down syndrome based on their lack of productivity is a pretty tortured reading of page 425 of the House Democrats’ bill, it refers to “advance care planning consultation” which is when a senior and a medical practitioner discuss “advance care planning if … the individual involved has not had such a consultation in the past 5 years.”
The consultation includes “an explanation by the practitioner of advance care planning, including key questions and considerations, important steps, and suggested people to talk to,” an “explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses,” and an “explanation by the practitioner of the role and responsibilities of a health care proxy.”
It directs the medical provider to give the patients “a list of national and State-specific resources to assist consumers and their families with advance care planning,” and an explanation “of the continuum of end-of-life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice, and benefits for such services and supports that are available under this title,” as well as “an explanation of orders regarding life sustaining treatment or similar orders.” This is something almost every hospital engages in already – at age 42 I was given such a consultation while recovering from surgery, even as a lawyer the consultation was informative and prodded me to making decisions that we all too often neglect because they are uncomfortable to think about – like wills and estate planning.
Factcheck.org disputes this interpretation, saying “accepted definition of end-of-life planning means thinking ahead about the care you would like to receive at the end of your life — which may include the choice to reject extraordinary measures of life support, or the choice to embrace them….the bill would not make these sessions mandatory.”
Likewise, Politfact suggests that this interpretation was “Pants-on-Fire” untrue.
Palin refers in her statement to Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who in a speech on the floor of the House, Palin said, described the “Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff. … I commend her for being a voice for the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.”
Bachmann’s speech was based on an op-ed article in the New York Post, titled “Deadly Doctors,” by the former lieutenant governor of New York, Betsy McCaughey, that took a number of leaps of fact when discussing the academic writings of Ezekiel J. Emanuel, health-policy adviser at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.
ABC vetted the factuality of McCaughey’s op-ed HERE.
The Heritage Foundation’s Thomas Sowell wrote a column, “Utopia Versus Freedom,” in which he warned readers to “not be surprised when life-and-death decisions about you or your family are taken out of your hands — and out of the hands of your doctor — and transferred to bureaucrats in Washington.”
In another column, “Care Versus Control,” he went further, asking, “Are decisions made by doctors who have treated the same patient for years to be over-ruled by bureaucrats sitting in front of computer screens in Washington, following guidelines drawn up with the idea of ‘bringing down the cost of medical care’? The idea is even more absurd than the idea that you can add millions of people to a government medical care plan without increasing the costs. It is also more dangerous.”
Having looked at other countries’ health care plans for his book, “Applied Economics,” Sowell wrote that “the actual consequences of government-controlled medical care is not a pretty picture, however inspiring the rhetoric that accompanies it. … Many people do not understand that it is not just a question of whether government bureaucrats will agree to pay for particular medical treatments. The same government-control mindset that decides what should and should not be paid for can also decide that the medical technology or pharmaceutical drugs that they control should not be for sale to those who are willing to pay their own money.”
Sowell’s are more reasonable arguments, though they don’t confess the fact that private health care insurance company bureaucrats already are making such decisions and government healthcare bureaucrats desperately need to. In any case, nowhere does he raise the specter of an Obama “death panel.”
Is this a taste of what’s to come from Ms. Palin? There is a point at which a differing interpretation or reading of something falls so far short of a reasonable interpretation that it takes the leap from a differing view to that of a lie – it’s the point at which the speaker attempts to create a belief in the listener at variance with their own beliefs. If Ms. Palin believes what she is trying to have us believe she is making a “pants on fire” wrong interpretation of the data, if she doesn’t believe it she is spinning a “pants on fire” tale. It is just another episode of polemic political partisanship – it’s as if when faced with something that is grey like an aircraft carrier it’s almost a given that a Democrat will say it’s white and a Republican will say it’s black. We deserve and require more of our representatives than this. This type of fear mongering is sad on two counts, first because nobody elects officials to lie and misrepresent issues and also because so many of us Americans are so ill-informed we’re easy targets for this type of rhetoric. A sad discovery politicians seem to have discovered is that when one arouses the fear centers of the brain the brain’s ability to reason is overwhelmed – shock and awe politics will be the end of us.
Other bloggers writing on the subject:
http://faithandaids.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/president-obama-on-healthcare-reform-this-is-about-peoples-lives/
http://jehingr.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/you-dont-have-health-insurance/
http://lloydmusing.wordpress.com/2008/06/20/elements-of-the-obama-health-care-policy/
Some examples of bloggers spreading the fear and dissinformation:
http://freemenow.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/incumbents-need-not-apply-2010/#comment-6225
http://javelineer.com/2009/08/09/obamas-thug-brigade-attacks/
http://ericatwitts.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/327/
http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/if-government-run-toilet-paper-doesnt-work-imagine-what-will-happen-with-government-run-health-care/
Related posts:
- Why Washington Residents Need Meaningful Healthcare Reform.
- Congressional Deadlock on how not to provide Health Care (Parody)
- It’s time for a Reality Check (from the Whitehouse)
- Why is a public option a necessary component of meaningful health care reform?
- Just say “NO” to anything that falls short of meaningful Healthcare Reform!
5 responses to Palin kicks the politics of fear and disinformation into high gear – Death Panels?
I am really sick and tired of the fear tactics of the GOP – Health Reform plans to kill old people last week, this week it’s for killing old people and kids with disabilities.
The lies were one thing, now they are systematically organizing disruptions at political meetings where the intent is to silence debate on healthcare reform entirely.
Frankly I think it all makes them look weak – if they had a real position on anything it would beat these tactics – it appears they are just the party of “No.”
I personally believe that healthcare reform is too important to allow it to be victim to partisan politics. In that light I’d rather not point to the GOP as the party of fear, I think both parties are guilty of dissinformation and fear mongering.
Alas I don’t see that we have any formal mechanism for truth seeking in our system, partisan think tanks have replaced impartial academia as aribters of fact in the battle of fact vs fiction.
It’s really time for the media to stop worrying about ratings and start standing up when the emperor has no clothes. I think one of the primary reasons we still haven’t resolved whether or not 183 waterboardings is torture is that the media never had the guts to call torture for torture – “enhanced interrogation techniques that some say are torture” is a complete abducation of their responsibility to the truth.
But Germany, the UK, Canada, and just about every other country with universal care rations end of life care. Single payer is like a giant HMO run by the government. Centralized government rationing is inevitable. Why shouldn’t we worry about this issue?
BBS’s comments about Sowell show a breathtaking ignorance about what insurance actually is.
And Daryl, why is partisan politics a problem? We have two dueling conceptions of human rights, governance, and yes health care – a European socialist conception from the liberals, and constitutionalism from conservatives. We’re all advocating for our views. That’s god, right? (I’ll leave out responses to the tortured references to “torture.”)
Gunnar says, ” it appears they are just the party of ‘No.’” Alas, that’s true.
[...] I wrote on that issue yesterday to find that Ms. Palin’s statements were in the worlds of a fact checking organization “pants on fire” wrong. [...]
Jeff, your sentence should read, “Germany, the UK, Canada and every other country with universal care and without exception every insurance company” subjects high cost procedures and end of life care to utilization review. (Utilization review being a little more objective than rationing with all the baggage that term brings). You ask why shouldn’t you worry about this issue. The reason is that it already exists – in fact Medicare is a fairly good model for a one payer system with one exception, medicare has never had a budget and as a pay for service system has never had utilization review.
The fact is that everyone with a private insurance plan is already subject to utilization review, caps, exclusions for pre-existing conditions and any other way to not pay insurers can come up with (that is their business model you konw – take in more premiums than you pay out in claims).
You should worry less about it because currently you’re far more likely to have your insurance company just tell you you’ve reached your event or lifetime cap or claim you have a pre-existing condition and tie you up in administrative appeals in the hope you’ll die before it’s resolved.
Finally partisan politics is fine if you have more than 2 parties – which we don’t. I wrote on that issue early this morning. It leaves us with the politics of black and whilte, a system quite incapable of dealing with the various shades of grey that constitute the world in which we live. The issue you take with “end of life rationing” is an example, the term is loaded by use of the specific word rationing where utilization review is less laden and as accurate, such utilization review is something that in reality currently exists EVERYWHERE BUT our nationalized insurance (Medicare) and is unavoidable anyway. It is because public figures in either party throwing out phrases like “Obama death panels” do nothing to support a healthy national discussion on the issue with a mind to resolution even if it’s resolution by compromise, instead they grandstand, they try to trigger the fear centers of the brain in the hope that rational analysis will be avoided.
I do appreciate your coments, thanks Jeff.