Losing the Debate, One Misleading Front Page at a Time

A common theme runs across many of the news stories on health care reform. America is losing the debate over the legitimacy of government and the value of honest discourse.

The conservative ideologues who have done more than anyone to discredit government and dishonor the truth are winning that battle but hurting the country, and doing it with witting and unwitting help from the media.

Today's NYT front page contains a sympathetic portrait of a middle-age couple in Georgia who are concerned about the wife's illnesses. Listening to the health reform debates, they've become convinced that the government is planning to limit/ration the wife's ability to get the treatments she needs.

The husband, anxious for his wife's well being, is moved to attend his local Congressman's townhall to express his anger over the government's takeover and apparent indifference to his wife's suffering.

He told Bishop that his wife of 36 years had survived breast cancer through early detection and treatment, and that he feared that her care would be rationed if the disease returned.

“She’d be on a waiting list,” he said.

“This is about the future of our country as we know it,” Mr. Collier warned, “and may mean the end of our country as we know it.”

That's all we see on the front page. The message that government in general, and the Obama Administration in particular, are out of control and want to ration care is loud and clear . . . except it's completely false.

When we pick up the story on page 10, the Times elaborates on the husband's political views and then identifies the source of his misinformation:

The Colliers are committed conservatives who have voted Republican in presidential elections since 1980. They receive much of their information from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s radio program and Matt Drudge’s Web site.

But the article doesn't say their fears are misplaced nor does it explain the couples' news sources are notoriously unreliable on this or many other subjects. Instead, we learn the couple have already been jerked around by their insurance company, so even though their own experience is a basis for some of the actual proposed reforms -- which the Times doesn't note -- they don't have that information or the necessary context in which to view the government's proposed regulations in a more favorable way.

To continue the misdirection, the Times has a separate story at the bottom of the same inside page, which makes no mention of the previous article. There we learn that "policy experts call fear of medical rationing unfounded." In other words, everything the couple in the prior story believed was false, and their media sources misled and lied to them.

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http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/7545

In many ways it is.

But there are two charts that have been circulating, largely out of view of most of the people on DU (or, if they've circulated here, I've missed them). The precise details of the charts aren't pertinent, there are slight variations on the same themes, so any one chart will sufficient from each set.


The first chart, expenses:



The second chart, necessarily taken from someplace on Mordor:



The second chart, which carried over without its label, has the title: "Age-based priority for receiving scarce medical interventions under the complete lives system", and is ultimately and faithfully taken from http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/PIIS0140673609601379.pdf. I've seen a few minor variants on this chart while wandering far afield, and I don't feel like dinking with things to provide an ideologically pure URL for those who love ad hominem attacks over dealing with facts.

Couple those with the emphasis on making the various health-care reform bills "pay for themselves" by savings, and you can form the hypotheses that pretty much everybody left of center considers utterly false. If not now, then at some point in time rationing will occur; that it will be political, possibly; and that health care for seniors, where the pot is biggest, will be raided (just as the SS fund was). Since rationing *will* be necessary--we have it based on personal economics at the present, right, both in private and in public insurance?--what will be the basis for it when the government needs to do it on a wider scale? "Cost-benefits analysis"? If so, what kind of costs and what kinds of benefits?

Add in the fairly persistent rumor (I don't remember if I've seen the claim sourced to anything or anybody reputable) that Obama has referred to something like these charts, and only when the going got a bit rocky disavowed any use for the second, and you're all the way there.

You see the problem. It's not rooted just in lies. It's rooted in abductive reasoning, and that has to be challenged for what it is. The difficulty is the rampant ill-will in American political discourse: If you don't trust the person whose presenting the claims counter to what you think, do you really listen?

Silly question. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x55618

Collier no doubt was grateful to to Emory Healthcare. But would the big for-profit insurance companies -- Bill Frist's United Healthcare, for instance, -- have done the same?

Emory is "the clinical arm of the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center of Emory University, which focuses on patient care, education of health professionals, research addressing health and illness, and health policies for prevention and treatment of disease."