Meet The Anti-Obamacare Myth-Maker Trump Just Named To His Economic Team

Betsy McCaughey's addition to Donald Trump's council of economic advisors seems fitting: both are conspiracy theory-floating sensationalists who have what you might describe as a hostile relationship with the truth.

Trump announced that McCaughey, along with seven other women, was joining his economic team Thursday after critics noted the council was made up entirely of men, only one PhD-holding economist and four Steves among them, upon its initial rollout.

The campaign's biography of McCaughey describes her as "a public policy expert," citing her Ph.D. from Columbia University, her time as the lieutenant governor of New York state, her two anti-Obamacare books and her "nationwide educational campaign to stop hospital-acquired infections." But it leaves out perhaps the greatest asset she brings to Team Trump: an ability to serve up distortions and flat-out falsehoods about Democratic legislation that mainstream Republicans and even credible media outlets devoured and regurgitated as conventional wisdom.

McCaughey's biggest success was her role in the defeat of the health care reform initiative led by then-First Lady Hilary Clinton, an achievement that makes her entry into this current electoral cycle all the more fitting. In what started as a Wall Street Journal op-ed, McCaughey pushed the inaccurate assertion that the Clinton legislation would ban health care consumers from paying doctors for services outside their government plans.

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