The Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate

[Jenn! 918]

By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK Published Aug 29, 2009

To the credit of opponents of health-care reform, the lies and exaggerations they're spreading are not made up out of whole cloth—which makes the misinformation that much more credible. Instead, because opponents demand that everyone within earshot (or e-mail range) look, say, "at page 425 of the House bill!," the lies take on a patina of credibility. Take the claim in one chain e-mail that the government will have electronic access to everyone's bank account, implying that the Feds will rob you blind. The 1,017-page bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee does call for electronic fund transfers—but from insurers to doctors and other providers. There is zero provision to include patients in any such system. Five other myths that won't die:

You'll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

The myth that a "health choices commissioner" will decide what benefits you get seems to have originated in a july 19 post at blog.flecksoflife.com, whose homepage features an image of Obama looking like heath ledger's joker. In fact, the house bill sets up a health-care exchange—essentially a list of private insurers and one government plan—where people who do not have health insurance through their employer or some other source (including small businesses) can shop for a plan, much as seniors shop for a drug plan under medicare part d. The government will indeed require that participating plans not refuse people with preexisting conditions and offer at least minimum coverage, just as it does now with employer-provided insurance plans and part d. The requirements will be floors, not ceilings, however, in that the feds will have no say in how generous private insurance can be.

No chemo for older medicare patients.

The threat that medicare will give cancer patients over 70 only end-of-life counseling and not chemotherapy—as a nurse at a hospital told a roomful of chemo patients, including the uncle of a NEWSWEEK reporter—has zero basis in fact. It's just a vicious form of the rationing scare. The house bill does not use the word "ration." Nor does it call for cost-effectiveness research, much less implementation—the idea that "it isn't cost-effective to give a 90-year-old a hip replacement."

The general claim that care will be rationed under health-care reform is less a lie and more of a non-disprovable projection (as is Howard Dean's assertion that health-care reform will not lead to rationing, ever). What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the current system, by both medicare and private insurance. No plan covers everything, but coverage decisions "are now made in opaque ways by insurance companies," says dr. Donald Berwick of the institute for healthcare improvement.

A related myth is that health-care reform will be financed through $500 billion in medicare cuts. This refers to proposed decreases in medicare increases. That is, spending is on track to reach $803 billion in 2019 from today's $422 billion, and that would be dialed back. Even the $560 billion in reductions (which would be spread over 10 years and come from reducing payments to private medicare advantage plans, reducing annual increases in payments to hospitals and other providers, and improving care so seniors are not readmitted to a hospital) is misleading: the house bill also gives medicare $340 billion more over a decade. The money would pay docs more for office visits, eliminate copays and deductibles for preventive care, and help close the "doughnut hole" in the medicare drug benefit, explains medicare expert Tricia Neuman of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance

The house bill doesn't give anyone free health care (though under a 1986 law illegals who can't pay do get free emergency care now, courtesy of all us premiumpaying customers or of hospitals that have to eat the cost). Will they be eligible for subsidies to buy health insurance? The house bill says that "individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States" will not be allowed to receive subsidies.

The claim that taxpayers will wind up subsidizing health insurance for illegal immigrants has its origins in the defeat of an amendment, offered in July by republican rep. Dean Heller of Nevada, to require those enrolling in a public plan or seeking subsidies to purchase private insurance to have their citizenship verified. Flecksoflife.com claimed on july 19 that "hc [health care] will be provided 2 all non us citizens, illegal or otherwise." Rep. Steve king of Iowa spread the claim in a usa today op-ed on aug. 20, calling the explicit prohibition on such coverage "functionally meaningless" absent mandatory citizenship checks, and it's now gone viral. Can we say that none of the estimated 11.9 million illegal immigrants will ever wangle insurance subsidies through identity fraud, pretending to be a citizen? You can't prove a negative, but experts say that medicare—the closest thing to the proposals in the house bill—has no such problem.

Death panels will decide who lives.

On July 16 Betsy Mccaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York and darling of the right, said on Fred Thompson's radio show that "on page 425," "congress would make it mandatory … That every five years, people in medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition." Sarah Palin coined "death panels" in an Aug. 7 facebook post.

This lie springs from a provision in the house bill to have medicare cover optional counseling on end-of-life care for any senior who requests it. This means that any patient, terminally ill or not, can request a special consultation with his or her physician about ventilators, feeding tubes, and other measures. Thus the house bill expands medicare coverage, but without forcing anyone into end-of-life counseling.

The death-panels claim nevertheless got a new lease on life when Jim Towey, director of the White House office of faith-based initiatives under George W. Bush, claimed in an Aug. 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed that a 1997 workbook from the department of veterans affairs pushes vets to "hurry up and die." In fact, the thrust of the 51-page book, which the va pulled from circulation in 2007, is letting "loved ones" and "health care providers" "know your wishes." Readers are asked to decide what they believe, including that "life is sacred and has meaning, no matter what its quality," and that "my life should be prolonged as long as it can...using any means possible." But the workbook also asks if readers "believe there are some situations in which I would not want treatments to keep me alive." Opponents of health-care reform have selectively cited this passage as evidence the government wants to kill the old and the sick.

The government will set doctors' wages.

This, too, seems to have originated on the Flecksoflife blog on July 19. But while page 127 of the House bill says that physicians who choose to accept patients in the public insurance plan would receive 5 percent more than Medicare pays for a given service, doctors can refuse to accept such patients, and, even if they participate in a public plan, they are not salaried employees of it any more than your doctor today is an employee of, say, Aetna. "Nobody is saying we want the doctors working for the government; that's completely false," says Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

To be sure, there are also honest and principled objections to health-care reform. Some oppose a requirement that everyone have health insurance as an erosion of individual liberty. That's a debatable position, but an honest one. And many are simply scared out of their wits about what health-care reform will mean for them. But when fear and loathing hijack the brain, anything becomes believable—even that health-care reform is unconstitutional. To disprove that, check the commerce clause: Article I, Section 8.

Source

[Tahoma 2,292]

In their spare time, the death panels could force boys to have circumcisions.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

At least a couple of those "myths" sound like good ideas.

[eros_EX_Plumber 0]

YEA...a 90 years old man needs a HIP replacement as much he needs VIAGRA.....

[Ban Hammer 13,332]

YEA...a 90 years old man needs a HIP replacement as much he needs VIAGRA.....

and granny getting a ####### job.

[alienlovechild 75]

You'll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

Assuming your employer doesn't dump your coverage for the cheaper government option.

No chemo for older medicare patients.

So the government will pay any cost no matter how old the patient? Wonderful, the taxpayers are going pay huge amounts so people can live a few months more. Ignores the fact there's always some kind of rationing so this point is a lie itself.

A related myth is that health-care reform will be financed through $500 billion in medicare cuts.

That's not what Newsweek says. . . doesn't sound like a myth.

Even the $560 billion in reductions (which would be spread over 10 years and come from reducing payments to private medicare advantage plans, reducing annual increases in payments to hospitals and other providers, and improving care so seniors are not readmitted to a hospital) is misleading: the house bill also gives medicare $340 billion more over a decade.

Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance

So the bills will bar every illegal immigrant that can't pay access to any health care (except ERs)?

Death panels will decide who lives.

Thus the house bill expands medicare coverage, but without forcing anyone into end-of-life counseling.

So doctors will recommend costly procedures to prolong life for a few months and not suggest an "easy" way out? That's BS from my Mom's experience on her deathbed even without a "death panel".

[Jenn! 918]

You'll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

Assuming your employer doesn't dump your coverage for the cheaper government option.

There are already cheaper options with less coverage. Why would employers change their current practice just because one of the cheaper options is now offered by the government?

A related myth is that health-care reform will be financed through $500 billion in medicare cuts.

That's not what Newsweek says. . . doesn't sound like a myth.

Even the $560 billion in reductions (which would be spread over 10 years and come from reducing payments to private medicare advantage plans, reducing annual increases in payments to hospitals and other providers, and improving care so seniors are not readmitted to a hospital) is misleading: the house bill also gives medicare $340 billion more over a decade.

$500 billion in cuts is not the same thing as reduction of planned increases - I believe that's the point they are trying to make.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

You'll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

Assuming your employer doesn't dump your coverage for the cheaper government option.

There are already cheaper options with less coverage. Why would employers change their current practice just because one of the cheaper options is now offered by the government?

Exactly. Employers have dumped and will continue to dump coverage for cheaper options - or just dump it altogether. If the government option would be cheaper but offering the same or similar benefit to the employee, then employers would likely add this to a list of options or offer the public option instead of no option at all. Employees are still free to buy whatever private coverage they'd prefer. Some employers might decide that they can afford to offer a public option plan to their employees while meaningful private insurance might be out of their reach. And again, without any changes, ever more employers will drop health benefits altogether leaving ever more workers w/o any coverage option at all.

[Niels Bohr 72]

Regardless if they're illegals or not, anybody can just walk into the emergency room for care. Good idea for illegals? Maybe. But, there's only 12 million illegals which is not much. What about the 50 million or more going without health insurance?

[Heracles 417]

Assuming your employer doesn't dump your coverage for the cheaper government option.

Well if employers dump you they will pay a fee. They don't get to dump you and walk away free.

It is wrong to assume people that have coverage now are automatically receiving the greatest coverage. Even in my own company, I know for a fact that upper management has a totally different policy that that of the entry level staff. I was chatting with one of their PA and she spilled the beans on it.

So the government will pay any cost no matter how old the patient? Wonderful, the taxpayers are going pay huge amounts so people can live a few months more. Ignores the fact there's always some kind of rationing so this point is a lie itself.

The government is not paying it as it's part of the coverage. It ingeniousness and immoral for anyone to bring that up considering the small percentage of people that would affect. When I hear such comments coming from people, I feel like I am speaking to someone from the middle ages or from a third world country.

That's not what Newsweek says. . . doesn't sound like a myth.

A large buying power means more lower prices. This is actually better for medicare.

So the bills will bar every illegal immigrant that can't pay access to any health care (except ERs)?

The better or the system will go bankrupt.

I am sure insurance companies will take the patient's interest to heart, oh wait they already leave people of all ages to die. That is fact and is happening now. Not some hearsay or propaganda about what is 'going to happen' under a government run system. People die every day because of insurance companies using various trick to deny coverage, which results in their death. Yes kids, teenagers, adults and the whole nine yards. A three minute google search will bring up plenty of cases.

Not for a fraction of a micro second will I ever buy that the government will not look out for the people; whereas, a private corporation whose sole purpose is to make money will.

[Heracles 417]

Regardless if they're illegals or not, anybody can just walk into the emergency room for care. Good idea for illegals? Maybe. But, there's only 12 million illegals which is not much. What about the 50 million or more going without health insurance?

People don't realize that we end up paying for that. Much like theft, the price is added on for everyone else to deal with. Illegal immigrants should be treated and then their governments should be billed for it.

There already is such a system setup where various first world countries allow their citizens to be treated in other countries and the governments cancel out the bill. For example, the following countries participate in a Reciprocal Health Care Agreements. This means that as a resident, you are entitled to assistance with the cost of medical treatment in:

* New Zealand

* The United Kingdom

* The Republic of Ireland

* Sweden

* The Netherlands

* Finland

* Italy

* Malta

* Norway

* Australia

Problem solved.

[Danno 1,228]

Regardless if they're illegals or not, anybody can just walk into the emergency room for care. Good idea for illegals? Maybe. But, there's only 12 million illegals which is not much. What about the 50 million or more going without health insurance?

People don't realize that we end up paying for that. Much like theft, the price is added on for everyone else to deal with. Illegal immigrants should be treated and then their governments should be billed for it.

There already is such a system setup where various first world countries allow their citizens to be treated in other countries and the governments cancel out the bill. For example, the following countries participate in a Reciprocal Health Care Agreements. This means that as a resident, you are entitled to assistance with the cost of medical treatment in:

* New Zealand

* The United Kingdom

* The Republic of Ireland

* Sweden

* The Netherlands

* Finland

* Italy

* Malta

* Norway

* Australia

Problem solved.

Kinda great idea..... except we would be trading with perhaps canada and a bunch of poor neighbors to the south.

[Danno 1,228]

By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK Published Aug 29, 2009

To the credit of opponents of health-care reform, the lies and exaggerations they're spreading are not made up out of whole cloth—which makes the misinformation that much more credible. Instead, because opponents demand that everyone within earshot (or e-mail range) look, say, "at page 425 of the House bill!," the lies take on a patina of credibility. Take the claim in one chain e-mail that the government will have electronic access to everyone's bank account, implying that the Feds will rob you blind. The 1,017-page bill passed by the House Ways and Means Committee does call for electronic fund transfers—but from insurers to doctors and other providers. There is zero provision to include patients in any such system. Five other myths that won't die:

You'll have no choice in what health benefits you receive.

The myth that a "health choices commissioner" will decide what benefits you get seems to have originated in a july 19 post at blog.flecksoflife.com, whose homepage features an image of Obama looking like heath ledger's joker. In fact, the house bill sets up a health-care exchange—essentially a list of private insurers and one government plan—where people who do not have health insurance through their employer or some other source (including small businesses) can shop for a plan, much as seniors shop for a drug plan under medicare part d. The government will indeed require that participating plans not refuse people with preexisting conditions and offer at least minimum coverage, just as it does now with employer-provided insurance plans and part d. The requirements will be floors, not ceilings, however, in that the feds will have no say in how generous private insurance can be.

No chemo for older medicare patients.

The threat that medicare will give cancer patients over 70 only end-of-life counseling and not chemotherapy—as a nurse at a hospital told a roomful of chemo patients, including the uncle of a NEWSWEEK reporter—has zero basis in fact. It's just a vicious form of the rationing scare. The house bill does not use the word "ration." Nor does it call for cost-effectiveness research, much less implementation—the idea that "it isn't cost-effective to give a 90-year-old a hip replacement."

The general claim that care will be rationed under health-care reform is less a lie and more of a non-disprovable projection (as is Howard Dean's assertion that health-care reform will not lead to rationing, ever). What we can say is that there is de facto rationing under the current system, by both medicare and private insurance. No plan covers everything, but coverage decisions "are now made in opaque ways by insurance companies," says dr. Donald Berwick of the institute for healthcare improvement.

A related myth is that health-care reform will be financed through $500 billion in medicare cuts. This refers to proposed decreases in medicare increases. That is, spending is on track to reach $803 billion in 2019 from today's $422 billion, and that would be dialed back. Even the $560 billion in reductions (which would be spread over 10 years and come from reducing payments to private medicare advantage plans, reducing annual increases in payments to hospitals and other providers, and improving care so seniors are not readmitted to a hospital) is misleading: the house bill also gives medicare $340 billion more over a decade. The money would pay docs more for office visits, eliminate copays and deductibles for preventive care, and help close the "doughnut hole" in the medicare drug benefit, explains medicare expert Tricia Neuman of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance

The house bill doesn't give anyone free health care (though under a 1986 law illegals who can't pay do get free emergency care now, courtesy of all us premiumpaying customers or of hospitals that have to eat the cost). Will they be eligible for subsidies to buy health insurance? The house bill says that "individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States" will not be allowed to receive subsidies.

The claim that taxpayers will wind up subsidizing health insurance for illegal immigrants has its origins in the defeat of an amendment, offered in July by republican rep. Dean Heller of Nevada, to require those enrolling in a public plan or seeking subsidies to purchase private insurance to have their citizenship verified. Flecksoflife.com claimed on july 19 that "hc [health care] will be provided 2 all non us citizens, illegal or otherwise." Rep. Steve king of Iowa spread the claim in a usa today op-ed on aug. 20, calling the explicit prohibition on such coverage "functionally meaningless" absent mandatory citizenship checks, and it's now gone viral. Can we say that none of the estimated 11.9 million illegal immigrants will ever wangle insurance subsidies through identity fraud, pretending to be a citizen? You can't prove a negative, but experts say that medicare—the closest thing to the proposals in the house bill—has no such problem.

Death panels will decide who lives.

On July 16 Betsy Mccaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York and darling of the right, said on Fred Thompson's radio show that "on page 425," "congress would make it mandatory … That every five years, people in medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition." Sarah Palin coined "death panels" in an Aug. 7 facebook post.

This lie springs from a provision in the house bill to have medicare cover optional counseling on end-of-life care for any senior who requests it. This means that any patient, terminally ill or not, can request a special consultation with his or her physician about ventilators, feeding tubes, and other measures. Thus the house bill expands medicare coverage, but without forcing anyone into end-of-life counseling.

The death-panels claim nevertheless got a new lease on life when Jim Towey, director of the White House office of faith-based initiatives under George W. Bush, claimed in an Aug. 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed that a 1997 workbook from the department of veterans affairs pushes vets to "hurry up and die." In fact, the thrust of the 51-page book, which the va pulled from circulation in 2007, is letting "loved ones" and "health care providers" "know your wishes." Readers are asked to decide what they believe, including that "life is sacred and has meaning, no matter what its quality," and that "my life should be prolonged as long as it can...using any means possible." But the workbook also asks if readers "believe there are some situations in which I would not want treatments to keep me alive." Opponents of health-care reform have selectively cited this passage as evidence the government wants to kill the old and the sick.

The government will set doctors' wages.

This, too, seems to have originated on the Flecksoflife blog on July 19. But while page 127 of the House bill says that physicians who choose to accept patients in the public insurance plan would receive 5 percent more than Medicare pays for a given service, doctors can refuse to accept such patients, and, even if they participate in a public plan, they are not salaried employees of it any more than your doctor today is an employee of, say, Aetna. "Nobody is saying we want the doctors working for the government; that's completely false," says Amitabh Chandra, professor of public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

To be sure, there are also honest and principled objections to health-care reform. Some oppose a requirement that everyone have health insurance as an erosion of individual liberty. That's a debatable position, but an honest one. And many are simply scared out of their wits about what health-care reform will mean for them. But when fear and loathing hijack the brain, anything becomes believable—even that health-care reform is unconstitutional. To disprove that, check the commerce clause: Article I, Section 8.

Source

See the problem is you are reading WAY TO MUCH into the bills and their exact wording.

Ya see everyone knows that the wording ... and promises given about any and all parts of this "plan" come with a short self-life.

What ever is agreed to now can be over turned by an administrator a Panel or at the most a Majority vote by the next grand-standing Politician eager to prove he "cares".

Everyone also knows that when the Gov gets involved and it is not working "to plan".... the answer is never to back-up, it is always to get in deeper.

Public Education is the most constant example.

This whole thing is no more than a "camels nose under the tent" by design anyway and no honest person pushing can deny that.

To your 5 points, I will just offer one.

1. By design, this is just the beginning of Public Health-Control.

[Heracles 417]

I am still trying to figure out why government is bad. Why the government automatically will fail while private industry are champs at running things. Regardless of public or private, I have just as many examples of success as I do of incompetence and failure with either. Therefor, it is wrong to assume one is, by default, worse than the other.

Biggest difference is that unlike organizations, you guys get to vote in the government and hold them accountable. Do I get to vote out comcast because they are a rip off and incompetent, nope. Heck, even if I wanted to I couldn't use someone else.

Edited August 30, 2009 by haza

[Danno 1,228]

I am still trying to figure out why government is bad. Why the government automatically will fail while private industry are champs at running things. Regardless of public or private, I have just as many examples of success as I do of incompetence and failure with either. Therefor, it is wrong to assume one is, by default, worse than the other.

Biggest difference is that unlike organizations, you guys get to vote in the government and hold them accountable. Do I get to vote out comcast because they are a rip off and incompetent, nope. Heck, I cannot even get the choice of using someone else.

The Govt has the power to create a monopoly we must use.... by force of law.

Ford can't do that.

Gov't is so inefficient because it can't go out of business. In fact, rather than go out of business it makes the Customer pay more via a tax hike or Bond.

See if I were the Govt leader and I thought I really could do it better and cheaper. I would gather all the people the Gov already provides medical coverage to now ... perhaps a 100 million and start with them.

Heck this pool is bigger than most nations.

Show us how well you can manage this "first phase".