Unmasking the McCaughey mischaracterizations - Part Six

September 7, 2:12 PMLiberal ExaminerJenny Kakasuleff

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Somerville residents Gladys Maged, left, and Liane Curtis hold signs in support of Health Care reform as members of the LaRouche Political Action Committee sing with a sign depicting President Obama as Hitler before a town meeting on Health Care at Somerville High School in Somerville, Mass., Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2009. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)

This exhaustive series comprising six separate articles only touches on the maddening depth of misinformation gripping the American public with respect to health care reform. Betsy McCaughey was instrumental in defeating reform when the Clinton’s took on the issue and now she is back to smear and spread fear once again.

Read: Part One

Read: Part Two

Read: Part Three

Read: Part Four

Read: Part Five

James Fallows of the Atlantic in an article written in 1995 describes McCaughey as someone who tried to portray herself as a disinterested observer “with no ax to grind and no preconceptions about health care, [who] sat down for a careful reading of the whole Clinton bill. Appalled at the hidden provisions she found, she felt it her duty to warn people about what the bill might mean.” Fallows – like most other independent experts – concluded that McCaughey’s declarations were “simply false.”

Ezra Klein, in an article titled “Lies, Damn Lies, and Betsy McCaughey,” references the op-ed she wrote for the New Republic. “The conceit of the piece was that unlike everyone else, McCaughey had pored over every page and paragraph of the massive Clinton health bill and come back with a clearer view of the legislation's contours than anyone had previously presented.” As he further notes, “McCaughey, it turned out, isn't a very good reader.” Indeed, the article she wrote was later retracted with an accompanying apology from the editor.

Gawker refers to McCaughey as a “professional liar.” Susie Madrak offers further evidence that McCaughey is a political opportunist. She notes, when McCaughey was replaced on the ballot as George Pataki’s lieutenant governor, she switched parties to run for governor against her former boss.

She complained that she was forced to turn to Democrats in the Legislature when Republicans rebuffed her efforts to expand pre-kindergarten programs in the state and to restrict the ability of health maintenance organizations to refuse to pay for experimental cancer treatments. 'It showed me which party puts patients ahead of politics and campaign contributions,’ McCaughey said. 'It's the Democratic Party.'”

McCaughey described herself as "the most socially progressive of the Democratic candidates," and “…was a crusader for unrestricted late-term abortion, a fan of gay rights and increased welfare spending, and someone who said she'd grown up and changed her mind about her opposition to the Clinton plan.” But, that was then, when she was pandering to liberals.

There is no underhanded, sinister plot to institute depopulation measures in an effort to cut health care costs, as McCaughey claims. The Medicaid cuts she proposed in 1995 as Lieutenant Governor of New York drew many of the same criticisms she points to today as inevitabilities of cuts to Medicare – yet she does not cite any abysmal failures associated with cuts to any government-funded programs to lend her claims validity.

McCaughey accuses her opponent’s of being unable to disprove her claims today as evidence that they must be true. Of course, trying to prove that her made-up, fantastical, hypothesized consequences are false would be like trying to prove there is no tooth-fairy. She can no more prove her accusations are correct than an opponent can prove them wrong, since she readily admits the bill does not actually say it would kill old people – it is merely the effect. Typically, the individual going outside the intent of the text has the burden of proof to contend with – not the individual interpreting the actual language.

McCaughey argues in a recent op-ed that “The harshest misconception underlying the legislation is that living longer burdens society. Medicare data prove this is untrue. A patient who dies at 67 spends three times as much on health care at the end of life as a patient who lives to 90, according to Dr. Herbert Pardes, CEO of New York Presbyterian Medical Center.”

If a misconception exists that the bill favors killing people sooner – it resides in the mind of McCaughey and the zombie-like, unquestioning adherents to her philosophy. If the bill was meant to kill people, wouldn’t it be easier to just not reform health care? Plenty of people are dying under the current system, and care is already being rationed, after all.

There is nothing wrong with examining the unintended consequences of policy decisions, but McCaughey takes the written language of the bill and mangles it beyond recognition, adding unsubstantiated claims, thereby distracting Americans from the real issues at hand. She cites no real world examples aside from the single-payer system of Britain – which bears no resemblance to HB 3200 – and is still a misleading claim, nonetheless.

She talks out both sides of her mouth, claiming on one hand that Medicare has been great for seniors, but that the same government which runs it cannot continue to be trusted to do the same, while extending similar benefits to more people.

McCaughey is a mega-spinster, who cherry picks pieces of information to support her thesis, while ignoring other facts from the same sources that conflict with her illustrated ideological preconceptions. She takes information from the Congressional Budget office that supplements her made-up claims, while ignoring everything that contradicts her beliefs. She similarly cites statistics from the National Cancer Institute.

Betsy McCaughey has no demonstrated record as a principled or consistent individual. There is nothing wrong with “growing up” and recognizing the naivete of a youthful claim, or receiving information that provokes a change in views. However, McCaughey is a serial recanter that has radically swung from one side of the pendulum to the other and back again. Her lies have proved despicable falsehoods in the end; a wise individual would stop making such hasty, overgeneralizations.

She was an independent before she was a republican; a democrat before running on the Liberal Party ticket in New York; and now she has made an apparent switch back to the GOP. After her gubernatorial loss, she went on to work for the Hudson Institute; a conservative think tank. Despite the fact that she renounced her own writings against the Clinton plan – we are expected to take her bipolar views seriously today?

Rising costs in health care are due in part to two unavoidable factors: an aging population relative to the workforce supporting them, and advanced medical technologies that are allowing us to live longer, more fulfilling lives – indeed at a monetary cost. This reality informs us that without rationing care, costs are going to rise; no matter how much in cost savings we are able to achieve. The president’s stated goal to “bend the cost curve” acknowledges this reality, and seeks to generate new revenues in addition to incentivizing internal efficiencies to make funding them as painless as possible. Reform will not be free, and no one is claiming that it will be.

The real discussion we are not having is how much more we are willing to pay to ensure that the elderly of today and tomorrow will be guaranteed the same care as those who have already benefitted from Medicare. How much more taxes are we willing to bear to provide quality care for everyone – not just the elderly and those with the ability to pay for it? How much will we sacrifice, in order to fund the necessary innovations that will keep America on the cutting edge of medical technologies?

These are moral questions for the collective conscience to mull over, but which also extend to the very core values of our society that guarantee equality of opportunity. These values are only measurable if everyone has equal access to quality health care, so that they can be members of a productive society that encourages solidarity, as well as free-market principles. Solidarity need not be a term associated with communism, and working together to lift everyone up rather than just the few, should not be considered an unworthy goal. America has prospered because everyone has shared in the wealth that has been created.
 

Copyright ©2009 Jenny Kakasuleff