[repeated line] Forrest Gump: Stupid is as stupid does.

August 12, 2009
Categories: Health care

Grassley on death panels: 'You have every right to fear'

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is warning that Americans should be worried about an "end of life" provision in the House health care bill.

“In the House bill, there is counseling for end of life,” Grassley said Wednesday during a town hall in Winterset, Iowa. “You have every right to fear. You shouldn’t have counseling at the end of life, you should have done that 20 years before. Should not have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”

A rumor that the legislation will determine when older Americans end their lives is rampant at town hall meetings, propelled in part by former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin who warned the Democratic plan would create bureaucratic "death panels."

The House health care plan would require Medicare to fund voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions for older Americans.

Grassley fueled -- rather than corrected-- the rumor at the packed town hall Wednesday morning, when asked about older Americans being "denied health care."

“There are some people who think it is a terrible problem that grandma is laying in a bed with tubes in her, and that the government should intervene,” he said. “I think that’s a family or religious thing that needs to be dealt with.”

By Lisa Lerer 04:10 PM

Red Herring

Alias:

• Ignoratio Elenchi ("ignorance of refutation", Latin)
• Irrelevant Thesis

Type: Informal Fallacy

Etymology:

The name of this fallacy comes from the sport of fox hunting in which a dried, smoked herring, which is red in color, is dragged across the trail of the fox to throw the hounds off the scent. Thus, a "red herring" argument is one which distracts the audience from the issue in question through the introduction of some irrelevancy. This frequently occurs during debates when there is an at least implicit topic, yet it is easy to lose track of it. By extension, it applies to any argument in which the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion.

Exposition:

This is the most general fallacy of irrelevance. Any argument in which the premisses are logically unrelated to the conclusion commits this fallacy.

History:

This fallacy is often known by the Latin name "Ignoratio Elenchi", which translates as "ignorance of refutation". The ignorance involved is either ignorance of the conclusion to be refuted—even deliberately ignoring it—or ignorance of what constitutes a refutation, so that the attempt misses the mark. This explanation goes back to Aristotle's On Sophistical Refutations, the focus of which is fallacious refutations in debate. As with all of Aristotle's original fallacies, its application has widened to all arguments.

Of course, fallacies of ambiguity involve irrelevance, in that the premisses are logically irrelevant to the conclusion, but this fact is disguised by ambiguous language. However, Aristotle classifies Ignoratio Elenchi as language-independent, though he does say:

One might, with some violence, bring this fallacy into the group of fallacies dependent on language as well.

But this would make Ignoratio Elenchi so wide that just about every fallacy—with the exception of Begging the Question—would be a subfallacy of it. This is too wide to be useful, so I will follow Aristotle in restricting it to non-linguistic fallacies, excluding those disguised by ambiguity or vagueness.

Exposure:

Logical relevance is itself a vague and ambiguous notion. It is ambiguous in that different types of reasoning involve distinct types of relevance. It is vague in that there is little agreement among logicians about even deductive relevance, with logicians divided into different camps, so-called "relevance" logicians arguing for a more restrictive notion of logical relevance than so-called "classical" logicians.

Another ambiguity of the term "relevance" is that logical relevance can be confused with psychological relevance. The fact that two ideas are logically related may be one reason why one makes you think of the other, but there are other reasons, and the stream of consciousness often includes associations between ideas that are not at all logically related. Moreover, not all logical relations are obvious, so that a logical relationship may not cause a psychological relationship at all.

Because it is the most general fallacy of irrelevance, most fallacious arguments will be identified as some more specific type of irrelevancy.

Subfallacies:

• Appeal to Consequences
• Bandwagon Fallacy
• Emotional Appeal
• Genetic Fallacy
• Guilt by Association
• Straw Man
• Two Wrongs Make a Right

Sources:

• Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, Section 1, Part 5; W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, translator.
• S. Morris Engel, Analyzing Informal Fallacies (Prentice-Hall, 1980), pp. 95-99.

Sen. Grassley Says 'End Of Life' Provisions Dropped From Senate Bill

1:48 pm

August 13, 2009

By Mark Memmott

The Senate Finance Committee has "dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely" from its version of health care overhaul legislation, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, announced today.

Those would be the provisions proposed in the House that would allow for Medicare to pay the costs of patients' consultations with doctors and other professionals about end-of-life issues. Opponents of health care reform -- including, very notably, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin -- have tried to make the case that the provision would create "death panels." In fact, that's not what the proposal would do.

Grassley says in this statement that:

"The bill passed by the House committees is so poorly cobbled together that it will have all kinds of unintended consequences. ... On the end-of-life issue, there's a big difference between a simple educational campaign, as some advocates want, and the way the House committee-passed bill pays physicians to advise patients about end of life care and rates physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care, while at the same time creating a government-run program that is likely to lead to the rationing of care for everyone. ...

"We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly."

categories: Health