Friday, August 14, 2009

Conservative Rightwing Jihad against Health Care Reform

"Tell a lie often enough, and people will believe it."

I don't know of any special interest group that has relied as extensively on lies, deceit, obfuscation, and fear as the Republican/ Right-Wing campaign to defeat healthcare reform in this country.

Tactics so intense and extreme are usually part of a propaganda campaign of one nation against another in a time of war. Indeed, it sounds at times as if the Republican Party and their supporters in the insurance, hospital, and
pharmaceutical industries have declared war on much of the American public and are completely ignoring all of the facts about healthcare.


This is a short list of my hall of shame nominees. Please feel free to add a coment with your choices.

Betsy McCaughey, She is the director of Cantel Medical, a medical device company. a former Republican lieutenant governor of New York, she was the former director of a biotech company called Genta. She’s also a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank funded by some of the biggest pharmaceutical giants in the country.

Ms. McCaughey wrote in an opinion piece that the government would actually tell doctors what procedures they could and couldn’t perform.

Wrong! The legislation specifically says that the council can’t issue requirements or guidelines on treatment or insurance benefits.

The 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, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care … all to do what’s in society’s best interest … and cut your life short. She claims that the economic recovery package would allow the federal government to eliminate "whatever" it deems to be "unnecessary" health care. and that the sessions would "tell [seniors] how to end their life sooner."

Wrong! The bill actually provides for is voluntary Medicare-funded end-of-life counseling. Medicare will pay for them to sit down with their doctor and discuss their preferences.
The sessions are an option for elderly patients who want to learn more about living wills, health care proxies and other forms of end-of-life planning.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C. said on the House floor that the bill would "Put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government."
Investor’s Business Daily published an editorial in which it claimed that H.R. 3200 would make private insurance illegal.

Wrong!
New individual, nongroup coverage will have to purchase it through a new health insurance exchange.


Congressman Steve King (R-IA) wrote that passage of the bill will see to it that up to 5.6 million illegal aliens have health insurance.

Wrong!
H.R. 3200: Sec 246 NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS
Then there are the lies and fear mongering from right-wing broadcasts and blogs.

Sarah Palin wrote that Obama death panel that the sick, elderly, disabled, and her Down Syndrome baby will likely succumb to if current healthcare reform is passed.

Sean Hannity, "If you don't have private insurance the year that this bill is passed, you can't get that later on from your employer."

Rush Limbaugh claims that the bill would "Outlaw individual private coverage."

Lies provided in talking points from the Republican National Committee such as, "Democrats are proposing a government controlled health insurance system, which will control care, treatments, medicines and even what doctors a patient may see."

Chris Matthews said "This thing, this provision, that talks about you get to talk about a living will. But it sounds to some people like, you're getting a little ill, all of a sudden somebody shows up at your door like they're a missionary and says "lets talk about how you're going to save the government money and your family the burden of continuing to live." that's the way it hits some people."

Lou Dobbs notions that end-of-life counseling could lead to "euthanasia" and that President Obama said he "doesn't even know what's in" the House health care bill. Dobbs suggests health care reform would deny liver transplants to alcoholics. President Obama and other progressives, claiming or suggesting that they or their policies are "socialist," "fascist" or "un-American." Dobbs claimed Obama policies are "raising new concerns about what many are calling a socialist revolution in prospect -- some say even a risk of totalitarianism."

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) said that the House bill would ban individual private health insurance. Obama did not understand the provisions of the bill.

Rush Limbaugh claimed, on July 22, that “there isn’t global warming and there isn’t a health care crisis, but Obama says he’s gotta raise taxes over the private sector to fix both those things.”“The crisis in health care is like the crisis in everything else – manufactured.”

Sean Hannity “I just don’t understand the logic, why you believe that the government can do what the free market had successfully accomplished, which was a health care system that was the envy of the world.”
Wrong
! Read this previous posting.


Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) on the Senate floor said “The health insurance industry is one of the most regulated industries in America,They don’t need to be ‘kept honest’ by the government.” a congressional investigation found that WellPoint’s Blue Cross of California and two other companies saved more than $300 million in medical claims by canceling more than 20,000 sick policyholders over a five-year period.

An ad by the Family Research Council "To think that Planned Parenthood is included in the government-run healthcare plan and spending tax dollars on abortions,""They won't pay for my surgery, but we're forced to pay abortions."

Wrong! The words "Planned Parenthood" and "abortion" don't appear anywhere in the text
.

Peter Ferrara, of the anti-tax, anti-government Institute for Policy Innovation, wrote on the National Review last month. "You may want healthcare that your doctor has prescribed for you. But the rationing bureaucracy in Washington that doesn’t even know you, or your doctor, may decide that your doctor doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or that you are too old for the government to pay for your hip replacement to stop the pain, or to get an expensive triple bypass or a pacemaker operation to save your life."

Wrong! Plenty of faceless hacks are denying people care right now; they just work for private insurance companies, not the government, and they're denying care because that helps keep the insurers' profit margins up.

Senator Max Baucus said "Lobbyists just want what's best for America." Baucus also had praise for the drug, insurance and other lobbyists saying: "They really care about our country."

Special Interest Groups and PAC's paid by insurance companies, drug makers, hospitals, device and equipment manufacturers, and even doctors. They all pay lobbyists huge sums of money to convince legislators to maintain the status quo, or to draft legislation in their favor.

Such as Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, America’s Health Insurance Plans, Healthcare Distribution Management, National Republican Trust PAC, Aetna, American Academy of Family Physicians, National Health Underwriters, Healthsouth Corporation and many more.

Sen. Ben Nelson raised $2,257,165 from the health and insurance sectors. Democratic Rep. Mary Landrieu raised $1,676,353 from the health and insurance sectors. Democratic Rep Ron Wydenraised raised $1,414,911 from the health and insurance sectors.
Independent Joe Lieberma
raised $3,593,771 from the health and insurance sectors. Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe raised $1,147,630 from the health and insurance sectors. Sen. Susan Collins raised $1,559,446 from the health and insurance sectors.


To these people I say, WTF! I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. You have no sense of decency and I have no respect nor admiration for any of you!

“Not all conservatives are stupid people, but most stupid people are conservatives." J.S. Mill

Steve

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