Betsy McCaughey is a crazy lady, in that when you hear her spew her political rhetoric that health care reform will kill senior citizens, you wonder if she's not channeling Joe McCarthy. This woman has been making quite a living scaring people out of supporting health care reform, as
James Fallows explains in The Atlantic: "In the early 1990s McCaughey single-handedly did a phenomenal amount to distort discussion of health-care policy and derail the Clinton health bill. She did so through an entirely fictitious argument about what the bill would do. You can go back in the records
here,
here, and
here, but the issue boils down to this: She claimed that the bill would make it illegal to go outside the government plan for coverage or pay doctors on your own. If a doctor took money for such outside-the-system services, she said, the doctor could go to jail. That was a flat-out lie. (One of the very first clauses of the legislation said, "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting the following: (1) An individual from purchasing any health care services.") But her imaginary "no exit" claim was repeated so often by so many "respectable" media sources that it effectively became "true" and played a large part in stopping the bill. It would be as if the "birthers" had persuaded John Roberts to say, "Wait a minute, let's take another look at that birth certificate" and decline to swear in Obama on inauguration day."
And she's baaack, spreading the false rumor that the latest health care reform proposal includes a
government death panel! It doesn't.
Luckily we have Jon Stewart to point this out and stand up to McCaughey's fancy politician footwork, in other words her blatant self-serving, careerist, narcissistic lies. Stewart dedicated an entire episode of the Daily Show to interviewing McCaughey, since her lies were so destructive the first time the government tried to fix the abysmally broken health care system.
Below are three videos of their debate, and each one gets hotter and hotter.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-21-2009 @ 4:27PM
nitecourt said...
She has no idea what she is talking about. What an idiot!
Reply
8-21-2009 @ 7:40PM
fauxpopuli said...
She knows perfectly well what she's saying and she understands the legislation just fine - you don't get a PhD in Constitutional history without learning how to read some legislation. She's just a cynical, lying opportunist who apparently thought the presence of the big binder was going to intimidate him away from challenging her knowledge of the bill, and my guess is that her "inability" to find page 432 had more to do with buying time to form an argument than anything else (I've looked at the bill myself and it's in numerical order. Amazingly enough page 432 is after 431.)
What is clear to me is that she had no idea what she was getting into. She thought she was going to bumrush some clueless comedian, scare him with a big binder and play sweet to the crowd (and oh man was that last one was disgusting to behold.) I don't think it's a coincidence that she got rolled by a comedian and stepped down from her gig at the infection board thingamjig a day later.
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8-21-2009 @ 7:41PM
harm said...
It certainly sounds like she's a typical politician....slime, in other
words. Let's not let health care reform go unquestioned,
though. As much free market and private enterprise as
possible ought to be part of Obamacare. (Oh, you say the free
market is what screwed up health care in the first place? Quite
the contrary, it was government meddling AND anti-competetive
practices by Insurers that left us where we are.)
Reply
8-21-2009 @ 10:21PM
Jim Lochrie said...
Betsy McCaughey certainly made a right fool of herself on Jon Stewart's show last night. She could not point to any of her claims in the actual bill that she brought to the show. It was agonizing as Jon Stewart repeatedly told her, and pointed it out in the legislation, "that's not what the legislation says". She is a terrible spokesperson for the opponents of reform in the health care system. We need to put her under lock and key until something is passed.
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8-24-2009 @ 10:39AM
Sam Stevens said...
What is abysmally broken about our health care system. In fact, it is the best in the world. Many things are broken, lets fix them.
Maybe more prevention would help lots of folks, but does this bill fix that? Only if people go to the doctors because now it free to them. There are false statements that other nations are better than the US. If that were true, people from those nations, such as Canada and England, would not be coming here for health care services. We have the best in the world
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