WATCH: This Is Why We Can’t Have An Adult Conversation About Health Care


In 2009, former Republican nominee for vice president Sarah Palin dominated the conversation about health care reform with one of the most potent and viral pieces of demagoguery in recent American history: death panels.

“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,” she said.

Palin’s science fiction-like conjecture of what the still-developing health care law will yield wound up killing a crucial and harmless part of the law: taxpayer-provided end-of-life counseling that would have asked all Medicare recipients to voluntarily set up a living will, which could have saved taxpayers billions while easing suffering for those near death and their families, who are often forced to make unbearable decisions.

Still, the lie persists.

A recent study suggests that even the act of debunking the law did little to blunt the misinformation. “Sometimes, providing accurate information will only propel false beliefs,” wrote The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff.

Since there’s no evidence that what Palin described is in the law, Republicans have just decided that the real “death panel” is the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).

IPAB is a 15-member board that cannot cut benefits or increase co-pays. It exists to make recommendations on cuts in payments to doctors only if Medicare’s costs grow too fast. Because the costs of government’s single-payer health care program for seniors are growing at an all-time low, the board won’t even convene until 2015 — at the earliest.

You can see now why it’s so hard to debunk this lie. The falsehood is so much more compelling.

Time magazine’s Mark Halperin did his part to keep the fraud alive during an interview with WorldNetDaily on Monday, when he said death panels are “built into the plan.” In the video above it comes around the eight-minute mark. Halperin corrected himself the next day — but the damage had been done.

Million Vets March Cruz Palin

 

Screenshot via Senator Ted Cruz’s YouTube channel

Start your day with National Memo Newsletter

Know first.

The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning

How A Stuttering President Confronts A Right-Wing Bully

Donald Trump mocks Joe Biden’s stutter,” the headlines blare, and I am confronted (again) with (more) proof that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee hates people like me.

Keep reading...Show less
Trump at Trump Tower

Former President Donald Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan

NEW YORK, March 25 (Reuters) - Donald Trump faces a Monday deadline to post a bond to cover a $454 million civil fraud judgment or face the risk of New York state seizing some of his marquee properties.Trump, seeking to regain the presidency this year, must either pay the money out of his own pocket or post a bond while he appeals Justice Arthur Engoron's February 16 judgment against him for manipulating his net worth and his family real estate company's property values to dupe lenders and insurers.

Keep reading...Show less
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}