Betsy McCaughey Argues That The United States ‘Is The Best Place To Be’ If You’re ‘Seriously Ill’
On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart hosted notorious anti-health care reform provocateur Besty McCaughey, who played a prominent role in sinking President Clinton’s reform effort in 1994 and recently helped spawn the “death panel” myth. Stewart lambasted McCaughey for her “hyperbolic” and “dangerous” claims, but the former Republican lieutenant governor of New York refused to back down on any of her assertions.
When Stewart challenged her on her false claims about end-of-life counseling, McCaughey repeated her debunked argument that the counseling was essentially mandatory because it supposedly ties doctors’ “quality” rating to how many of their patients have living wills. Later, in the segment of the interview that was only posted online, McCaughey claimed that Americans have the best life expectancy in the world:
MCCAUGHEY: Let me say one thing that’s really important. Right now, if you’re seriously ill, the best place to be is in the United States. We are number one…
STEWART: If you have the resources.
MCCAUGHEY: No, we are number one.
STEWART: If you have the resources.
MCCAUGHEY: We are number one in cancer survival rates in 13 out 16 most common forms of cancer and that, those data reflect the experiences of all people, not just those with insurance. So, my view…
STEWART: We’re 50th in infant mortality and 46th in life expectancy.
MCCAUGHEY: Wait a second, life expectancy, when you remove violent crime and car accidents, we are number one.
Watch it:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Exclusive - Betsy McCaughey Extended Interview Pt. 2 | ||||
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McCaughey is referring to a commonly cited University of Iowa presentation. But she and others who cite it are ignoring the fact that there is another measure that is used to specifically examine a health care system’s impact on life and death — “amenable mortality.”
Amenable mortality measures “deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care,” such as treatable cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. According to the Commonwealth Fund, the United States ranked last in comparison to 19 industrialized countries with a rate of 109.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2002–03. In the leading countries, mortality rates per 100,000 people were 64.8 in France, 71.2 in Japan, and 71.3 in Australia.
New poll finds that 77 percent of Americans still support the public option.
In recent weeks, the fate of the public option in new health care legislation has been uncertain. Yet, while the issue continues to be hotly debated in the halls of Congress, a new poll by Survey USA finds that the idea is as popular as ever amongst the American public:
More than three out of every four Americans feel it is important to have a “choice” between a government-run health care insurance option and private coverage, according to a public opinion poll released on Thursday.
A new study by SurveyUSA puts support for a public option at a robust 77 percent, one percentage point higher than where it stood in June.
The SurveyUSA poll finds similar results to several other polls that also show that the public option is very popular, a fact that some members of Congress consider to be a detriment.
Sen. Kyl: Negotiations Difficult Because of 'Liberals,' Republicans Won't Support Current Bills
By Susie Madrak Friday Aug 21, 2009 9:00amVia Media Matters:
In an interview with Fox News' Neil Cavuto, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) made it clear, again, that current proposals for health insurance reform will not receive any Republican support. "For either the bill that passed the House Committee or the bill that passed the HELP committee in the Senate, I don't think a single Republican in the Senate would support either of those bills," he declared. Kyl went on to say that the three Republicans engaged in talks with Democrats, led by increasingly erratic Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), are finding negotiations "very difficult" because of the "liberals in both the House and the Senate."
Kyl's comments come just two days after he told reporters that "almost all Republicans" will oppose reform, even if Democrats make significant concessions -- remarks that Steve Benen called "the death knell of bipartisan negotiations."
How the media made this summer's political insanity inevitable
The most striking aspect of this summer's political insanity isn't the frothing at the mouth of a loud minority of Republicans that President Obama is a secret Kenyan bent on subjecting an unwitting American public to government death panels, or the mass confusion among the rest of the public about health care reform.
It's that any reporter who has been paying the slightest bit of attention is surprised by any of this. It is, after all, the inevitable result of the way the media do their jobs.
Let's start with the 'round-the-bend howling about Obama's place of birth, which reached a fever pitch a few weeks ago. There was no basis for it -- Obama was born in Hawaii, as government documents, the state of Hawaii (including its Republican governor), and contemporaneous newspaper accounts confirm. Because there is no basis for it, many reporters are shocked that right-wing activists, with the help of some in the media, promoted the nutty and false claim that Obama was secretly born in Kenya, and that many Americans fell for the phony conspiracy theory.
Why on earth would anyone be surprised by this? The last time America had a Democratic president, right-wing activists, with the help of some in the media, said he was responsible for the murder of his close friend and aide, Vince Foster -- and dozens of other murders, too. Why would anyone think that people who are willing to baselessly and falsely accuse one president of murder, drug smuggling, and an assortment of other crimes be unwilling to claim that the current president was born in Kenya?
You'd have to be hopelessly naive to think that people who spent years calling President Clinton a murderer wouldn't dare demand that President Obama produce a birth certificate. Or that people who believed one president was a murderer never would believe another was born abroad.
Ah, but maybe reporters are just surprised that the birthers were egged on by some congressional Republicans? They shouldn't be. Dan Burton, the Republican congressman who chaired the Government Reform & Oversight Committee, shot up a melon in his backyard in order to "prove" that Vince Foster was murdered. We're supposed to be surprised that some members of Congress are trying to capitalize on the birther conspiracy theories? Come on. Be serious.
President Clinton's opponents accomplished three things with their nasty and false claims that he was a drug-running murderer: They angered and energized millions of Americans who didn't like Clinton, created doubt and confusion among millions more, and hijacked control of the national dialogue (due in large part to the media's inability to resist shiny objects and their weakness at making clear what is true and what is false.) Why wouldn't they try to do the same to President Obama?
And the barrage of health care lies, and accompanying mass confusion about the most basic facts? MSNBC has spent much of the past week, if not longer, expressing shock at the lies and their effectiveness.
Have these people been asleep, Rip Van Winkle-style, for the past few decades? Conservatives buried the last serious effort at universal health care under an avalanche of (media-abetted) lies. And they won the 2000 election on the strength of (media-abetted ... and sometimes media-invented) lies. And they took us to war in Iraq based on (media-abetted) lies. And ... well, you get the point. When was the last time conservatives approached a big fight without relying heavily, if not exclusively, on misinformation and deception? Why would anyone have thought this time would be different?
Likewise, the increasingly obvious fact that conservatives aren't actually interested in working toward bipartisan reform -- this seems to have taken reporters by surprise. But when was the last time conservatives made significant concessions in order to win bipartisan support for anything?
What makes all this shock really amazing is that so much of political journalism consists of pontification by people who have supposedly been around and understand how things work -- and yet they're constantly stunned when history repeats itself in the most predictable of ways.
And the latest realization that has so many reporters flabbergasted: the misinformation has worked! People believe falsehoods about health care! Many people don't even know basic facts about the current system!
Gee, you don't say? Many people don't know the basic facts about anything. That's one of the basic facts of American democracy. And when people are repeatedly told things that aren't true by people they trust, they tend to believe those things. That's one of the basic facts of ... people.
Surely reporters -- whose jobs, after all, involve communicating with the public -- are aware of these basic facts of life? Surely they've heard the expression about a lie making it halfway around the world before the truth has time to get its boots on? So why are they so surprised? Particularly when they've spent the bulk of the health care debate talking about politics and polls and chattering endlessly about who is "winning the message war" rather than repeatedly and clearly explaining to viewers the facts about health care.
Just look at the way much of the media have reacted to the belated realization that the public is woefully misinformed: By speculating -- sorry, "analyzing" -- why this is the case, and guessing -- sorry, "analyzing" -- whether the White House can develop a "message" that "works." And what aren't they doing in reaction to this realization? Clearly and repeatedly explaining the facts. And they're surprised people don't know the truth. Unbelievable.
In fact, it is the media's behavior that has made this summer's madness inevitable. When they let the loudest yellers and most audacious liars drive the discourse, they guarantee that people who can't win on the merits will yell and lie. When they focus on politics rather than policy, they guarantee the public will remain in the dark about basic facts. When they repeat false claims, or treat them as he-said, she-said situations, they guarantee that those false claims will sway confused citizens. When they continue to give a platform to people who have a history of lying -- and assume those people are telling the truth this time -- they guarantee those people will continue to lie.
As long as the media approach their jobs this way, we're going to see the same thing play out over and over again. And each time, the media will be shocked -- shocked -- that some people lie, and other people believe lies.
Or they could do things differently: They could set aside the punditry and the "analysis" and the polls and the freak show and dedicate themselves to explaining the facts about health care. And explaining the facts means more than calling a lie a lie -- though that is hugely important. It also means proactively telling people how the health care system works, and what the proposed reforms are, how they would work, and what the likely effects would be.
If they won't do that, at least they could stop telling us how shocked they are at the inevitable results of their behavior. It's getting old.
Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C.
Chris Hedges on Health Care, War and the New Racism
Posted on Aug 20, 2009
Chris Hedges talks about the illusion of health care reform, the war in Afghanistan and what he calls the “new racism” in the age of Obama.
When Racism Stands in the Way of Universal Healthcare
At first sight, Barack Obama's health care plan may look like a worthy, though minimal, effort to stop insurance companies refusing to help people who are sick, but there is a sinister hidden agenda. A driving passion underlying all his policies, which he is hiding from you. This insight, like so many, comes from FOX TV host Glenn Beck, a man who gives a voice to right-wing crazy. Says he:
"Everything that is getting pushed through this Congress, including this health care bill are [sic] transforming America. And they are all driven by President Obama's thinking on one idea -- reparations". (Followed by comic impression of person calling him a right-wing extremist)
Reparations! Obama's plan to take revenge on white people for slavery.
For the innocent, Glenn Beck is a TV and radio demagogue semi-famous for such oratory as the I-hate-9/11-and-Hurricane-Katrina-victims speech, currently using up his 15 minutes to spectacular effect on FOX as a 21st century Father Coughlin. The angry mobs showing up to scream in public meetings at Democratic congressional representatives and advocates of reform regularly cite Beck as a reference.
Beck's view that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for the white people" is the fervid projection of a paranoid mind which looks at the mildly liberal policies of a mixed-race president and sees the spectre of Mao/Hitler and a black man coming to get him simultaneously. (If you think that's exaggerated even slightly, you haven't watched his show).
Yet crazy as it is, it is not original crazy, but a kind that has deep roots in American society. It's the usually unstated idea that public welfare itself is a devious system for taking money from whites and giving it to blacks. Beck's verbal turd is a variant of a highly successful pincer assault on public support for low-income Americans that has used white racial resentment shamelessly to powerful effect. And it has held low and middle-income Americans - both black and white - back for generations.
As Nobel-Prize winning economist (doesn't that still have a good ring to it?) Paul Krugman explains in his book, 'The Conscience of a Liberal', racism has previously wrecked a major effort to provide universal health care in the US.
After the Second World War, President Harry Truman, like most of the post-war governments of developed countries, tried to create a system -- against opposition from industry -- to guarantee public access to medical treatment regardless of ability to pay. But unlike Britain, France or Canada, the United States of 1947 had a peculiar feature -- a large, Apartheid state in the South which since the aftermath of the Civil War had sought to deprive the newly-freed black population of their rights through discrimination and terror.
Southern politicians figured that Truman's proposals for national health insurance would mean federally-funded hospitals where black patients would be treated alongside whites, something their tiny-minded worldview could not allow. Alongside the scorched-earth campaign against Truman by the American Medical Association which fired doctors who backed national health insurance, racism helped to sink the plan, and everyone lost out -- including southern whites.
Racial politics in America moved in a new direction with two major developments -- the Great Migration and Civil Rights. With few prospects in the South and the birth rate bulging, many African-Americans had been leaving for the cities of the North and West. Large numbers of young, black men ended up in run-down, overcrowded slums from LA to Chicago to Baltimore, where they and their children were disappointed anew. They too often discovered discrimination and police racism afresh, while also finding that as manufacturing started declining in the 60s, the major growth industries actually open to them were in organized crime.
The scene was set for both unrest and a major crime wave across America's cities which would serve to bolster white prejudice. The liberal reformers of the Johnson White House who worked round the clock to extend black voting rights and end segregation in the South were caught out by the unintended consequences of bad city planning and discrimination outside it. President Johnson watched the L.A. Watts riots of 1965 with disbelief.
Just as the civil rights movement changed the balance of power in the South and promised a new era of justice, so a deceptive new racist narrative began to take hold -- that black people had been given everything they could reasonably ask for, only to respond with violence and further demands.
The Republican Party of Richard Nixon looked on and smiled. Nixon's famous Southern Strategy successfully used white racism to win the South from a Democratic Party that had finally rejected segregation. The party of Abraham Lincoln won southern hearts, at the price of its own.
But a more general strategy for the emerging conservative movement was to exploit racial resentment across the USA, and use it to attack the New Deal which had remained untouchable since the 1930s. It was a scheme explained by the Karl Rove of the '80s, Republican strategist Lee Atwater in 1981:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires."
Progress up to a point -- but with Plan A aborted, they're on to Plan B...
"So you say stuff like forced busing [of white children to black schools], states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. ... You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'"
Abstract can do it. Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign in 1980 in Philadelphia, Neshoba County, Mississippi -- the site of the police/Klan murders of 3 civil rights activists in 1964 in 1964 (for which Edgar Ray Killen, Klansman and Baptist minister, was convicted a solid 51 years later). Reagan for the first time chose to speak there about the importance of "state's rights" -- the rallying cry of racism demanding the freedom to oppress without federal interference since before the Civil War.
Before the 1960s, many black people were simply blocked from receiving government support they were legally entitled to. As this discrimination ended, the number who took government help rose dramatically. And no one did more than Reagan to make an issue of welfare rolls swollen by previously denied black recipients. He did however, with the odd slip, keep most of his attacks on welfare "abstract" to avoid direct racial animosity, as Atwater advised.
Atwater himself, trying to defeat George Bush I's opponent Michael Dukakis in 1988, opted for less abstract when he plastered the face of the black murderer Willie Horton, who committed a further assault and rape on a weekend furlough during a lifetime prison sentence, on Republican pamphlets across America in the hope he could "make Willie Horton his [Dukakis'] running mate".
Glenn Beck is not known for the abstract nature of his thought and his attempt to make out that all government spending on welfare and health care is an attack on white people by a Black president has all the subtlety of a burning cross:
"He [Obama] believes in all the "universal" programs because they "disproportionately affect" people of color. And that's the best way, he feels, to right the wrongs of the past. These massive programs are Obama brand reparations..."
Yes, Glenn, programs to help the less well-off will help non-white minorities disproportionately, because... they are disproportionately less well-off. Just like hospitals disproportionately help sick people. Consider the level of a mind that regards this as sinister.
The embarrassing confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, and the prominence of those who insist Barack Obama is a secret Muslim/Kenyan citizen has already made it clear that the conservative movement in America cannot escape its roots in fear and suspicion of non-whites.
What is important is that these hackneyed divide and rule tactics don't stop the rest of America's working people getting the healthcare and public services they need any more.
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