Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Palin's 'Death Panel' and GOP Lying

By Robert Parry
August 11, 2009

False Republican claims about President Barack Obama’s health-care initiative, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s demagogic charge about a “death panel,” are part of a pattern of systematic lying that has marked the GOP’s political tactics at least since Ronald Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s.

Read on.

3 comments:

BARB BF said...

Sounds like rationing to me...

This may be one reasons Seniors are alarmed by the plans for ObamaCare. Larry Summers speaks about frequency of different procedures...and no benefits in terms of the health of the population...and the right kind of cost-effectiveness. This is an actual transcript from Meet the Press.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/
id/30291720/page/2/

DR. SUMMERS: The president's laid out a number of measures on the tax side and in--and much more importantly, a number of measures that involve taking costs out of the Medicare, the Medicare budget. But the really important issue for the long run, David, is changing the way in which we deliver health care in this country. You know, there have been a whole set of studies done, they look at health care, the frequency of different procedures, whether it's tonsillectomies or hysterectomies in different parts of the country, and what you see is that in some parts of the country procedures are done three times as frequently and there's no benefit in terms of the health of the population. And by doing the right kind of cost-effectiveness, by making the right kinds of investments and protection, some experts that we--estimate that we could take as much as $700 billion a year out of our health care system. Now, we wouldn't have to do anything like that, we wouldn't have to do a third of that in order to pay for a very aggressive program of increased coverage. And so really the president and OMB director Orszag have identified a number of items that they call the game changers: prevention, cost-effectiveness, research, doing a better job on, on reimbursements. And as we put those into effect we can get this growth of health care costs under control. And it'll be a good thing for the federal budget and, frankly, a good thing for the national economy.

Anonymous said...

Death Panel and GOP lying. "It was during the early Reagan administration that it hit me that falsifying reality was no longer an aberration for Republicans"

It first hit me about 1970 with the POW campaign. Kids in school had as the day's assignment, writing to Hanoi (in English) to "free our prisoners" . Propaganda arrived with my home electric bill. Our pilots were presented as a combination of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby and Bataan Death March victims. No mention of what the pilots did.

Anonymous said...

Wow. Wick held a fundraiser for AIM and others? Who got the money? Certainly not AIM. Show me the money!