Obamacare falsehoods based on lies
At the end of a PBS NewsHour discussion of the year in politics, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne said we should call an end to any rhetorical shorthand used by Sarah Palin or the right while ignoring lies by the left. Of course, that is not how he put it. His exact words follow.
“Let us at least base our arguments on facts,” he said after having just instructed Republicans that government is a good thing and can stand for fairness. “No more ‘death panels,'” he said.
Good enough, you think? I will grant that the widely denounced Palin expression was more melodramatic manipulation than dispassionate dialectic, but it pointed to something indisputably real: legislative ambitions to limit medical treatments and save money through statist intervention.
Palin pounders are frequently mum about the real issue or shrug their shoulders at its moral implications, and here is something else they fail to mention: The death-panels hyperbole was piddling stuff next to the misstatements, distortions and exaggerations used to achieve passage of a health care law House Republicans now quite properly intend to eviscerate.
Remember how, over and over again, we were told about 46 million Americans who had no health insurance? The implication was that none of them had access to it and the even more outlandish suggestion often was that they therefore had no health care at all.
The truth is that hospitals are required by federal law to treat all in serious need and that the purportedly deprived were a combination of foreigners here illegally, those who could have had Medicare or Medicaid if they applied, others who simply did not wish to purchase insurance, and yes, a significant number who were denied all possibilities of purchase.
Accused of wanting to subsidize non-citizens, President Obama implicitly conceded error by switching to a 30 million figure that excluded aliens, and then went further. The administration and Congress suddenly realized that many of the millions who were supposedly denied insurance were really people who didn’t want it and who would have to be forced to buy it anyway, Constitution or no Constitution.
The other falsities? Let’s mention just a few. The president himself repeatedly pointed to miserably low longevity statistics in the United States. Subtract deaths by homicide and highway accident and we live longer than anyone. We were told our treatments did not match up with other countries when outcomes are mostly better than what you will find almost anyplace. We were told about outrageous insurance company profits even though 85 industries rake in much more.
We were told the program would not mean higher insurance premiums. It will. We were told people would not be forced out of their old insurance programs. They will be. We were told how wonderful various collectivist schemes were without being told how some of them force you to wait in line until death renders patience. We were told Medicare benefits would not be reduced. Look again.
There are some positive elements in this new health law, but no less an expert than the dean of the Harvard Medical School says it does next to nothing to control costs or improve the quality of care. A Harvard economist has meanwhile shown how you could achieve most of the positives by switching from employer-subsidized insurance to individual-subsidized insurance at no extra costs, whereas this monstrosity could be one of the best friends ruinous national debt accumulation ever had.
Despite various subterfuges, this freedom-denying monstrosity could crush us fiscally, has already acted to prolong the recession and promises to confer an unmanageable, insurance-destroying, bureaucratic absolutism on a medical system that might never recover.
While repeal probably won’t happen, there might be other ethical, legal ways for Congress to thwart this insanity and make our government do something good. It’s only fair.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.