Betsy McCaughey's Scary Stories About Health Care: What Needs to Be Done

Original Link: http://healthcare.change.org/blog/view/betsy_mccaugheys_scary_stories_about_health_care_what_needs_to_be_done

by Tim Foley

Add my voice to the growing chorus of disgust that our national debate on health care is once more sodden with the willful misunderstanding, distortions and outright fabrications of former Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey. But Bloomberg.com has a heavy responsibility in enabling McCaughey’s lies – not just by giving her a spot on the Opinion page, but by the abdication by their chief Health Policy writer of a journalistic analysis of the health care provisions in the stimulus and what they really mean. We need to push back against McCaughey’s flapdoodle yarns, but Bloomberg.com needs to step up and report on this story – finally – the right way.

Write to Bloomberg.com's Health Policy reporter and ask for a real story on the health care provisions in the stimulus bill.

The scary stories McCaughey spun about health care provisions in the stimulus in an opinion piece are bad enough, catalyzing the right-wing noise machine into frothy fits of outrage against Health IT (a project, long overdue, to reduce errors and save lives and money which the Republican candidate for president also championed) and comparative effectiveness research – the apparently evil and insidious attempt to gather data on whether our treatments lead to healthier patients or just wasted money. The fact that her prevarications dovetail so neatly with the objectives of the pharmaceutical lobby and the medical device lobby, who are leading the charge, is worse.

You can find refutations of every one of McCaughey’s points up and down the Internet today. Bob Dougherty on the ACP Advocate Blog gives a point-by-point refutation of the urban legends of Betsy McCaughey. James Fallow, who debunked McCaughey’s health care scare-mongering in the 1990s in the article, “A Triumph of Misinformation” is back today with the equally persuasive “Let’s Stop This Before It Goes Any Further,” challenging the media and the public, “Seriously, every one of McCaughey's statements about public policy from this day forward should be subjected to the "Oh yes, and how did it turn out last time?" test.” Ezra Klein follows up with a thorough debunking of McCaughey’s major claim, that through the combination of comparative effectiveness research and The National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (which McCaughey claims is a new insidious position, but which was actually created by George W. Bush in 2004). So you don’t need my spin on her willful misreading of the legislation.

But you might need me to prompt you as to who (the bleep) Betsy McCaughey is.

During the middle of the Clinton health care reform, she published an article in The New Republic claiming to have closely read the legislation and finding therein alarming clauses that would prevent you from going outside the plan for care, and forbidding individuals to pay the doctor they wanted. It was all based on nonsense, easily refuted by reading Section 3 of the legislation, which said, “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services.” But her article and her similar fictitious follow-up (for which The New Republic ultimately apologized) made her a conservative star in the fight against health care reform. Sure enough, she was soon tapped to join the NY ticket as Lt. Governor to George Pataki, who beat Mario Cuomo to become the first Republican Governor of New York since the 70s. There, her rise to the top became… weird, and somewhat disturbing. There was the Medicaid reform portfolio that never really went anywhere. There was the fight with the Speaker of the Assembly… in the lobby. There was the “What the holy heck is going on here?” State of the State address where she, from her raised platform behind Gov. Pataki, stood up… for the entire speech. (Cue crazy, tinkly piano music). Suffice to say, Pataki dropped her from the ticket, and she ran against him first as a Democrat and then on the Liberal party line. Now, she’s a staffer at a conservative think tank and, with the race for a Republican challenger to the New York Governor in 2010 wide open, she’s suddenly back in the spotlight. The script looks identical – do a “close reading” of health care legislation that sounds scary but turns out to be entirely fraudulent, get hailed by the noise machine, and parlay that exposure to… to… to be continued, I guess. Hey, it worked last time!

That’s who we’re dealing with, folks. That’s the person being cited as an objective reporter by Fox News, Rush and the like. On health care, she’s the politician who cried, “Wolf!”

But let me return to the most disturbing part of this circus: the actions of a reputable news source like Bloomberg.com, whose Health Policy writer, Aliza Marcus, has not contributed one article objectively analyzing the health care provisions in the stimulus. This gulf of impartial reporting has allowed the noise machine to characterize McCaughey’s fairy-tale as “the article from Bloomberg.com” on this topic, and not the agenda of a former (and potentially future?) high-ranking Republican politician.

That’s easily fixed. Bloomberg.com and Ms. Marcus need to step up and do their job – report the unbiased truth.