Here is yet another speech from the President calling his opponents liars.
I've listened to arguments from both sides. Some are plausible, some are not.
Congress and Obama have been working at this propaganda campaign for a long time now. The first I saw of it was the White House blog I cited a couple weeks ago. There's also a White House video series in which top aides attempt to 'debunk' the 'myths' that are being spread around.
The two most important 'lies,' in my eyes, are that we'll lose our current coverage and that the government may choose to refuse end of life care to the elderly. The White House says they are lies, myths, rumors, etc, because they are not written into any of the drafts of the bill.
However, if we look beyond the words in the bill, which our leaders haven't read, and beyond the rhetoric promising rights to this or that, what do we see?
There is no question that the bill will greatly harm insurance companies by imposing so many extra costs and restrictions. If there is a public option, they won't be able to raise prices very much or people will flock to the cheaper government plan.
Instead, they'll probably lose money slowly, maybe try to think of 'creative' ways to make up for the losses and get around the restrictions.
(Wait, why does that sound familiar – an entire industry taking on government-imposed risks and then creating 'innovative' ways to spread the risk, just to be able to make money?)
If there is no public option in the bill, then they'll raise prices, defeating the purpose, and the government will step in to take over then. Either way, it's a pretty dire situation for the health insurance industry.
So at one point or another, we'll probably be forced under the government plan. When the insurance companies fail, there won't be any other options, and Congress will be right there ready to save us.
That is where the 'myth' of losing our current policies comes from. Now, on to the 'death panels'…
Of course there are no 'death panels' in the legislation being proposed. That would cause a public outrage to dwarf anything we've seen so far.
Logically, though, by far the most expensive group in terms of health care is the senior population (darn them for wanting to live!), and it simply is not feasible to cover all the expenses at low cost to the patient.
The government is basically promising to cover just about everything, in order to get the bill through. If they pay for acupuncture and psychotherapy, how will they cut costs?
The only way is to have some 'independent group' assess whether the treatment your doctor recommends is likely to keep you alive, or if you're going to die soon anyway. Oregon has kindly provided a look into the future with this story and more: denying coverage for late-stage cancer treatment, but offering to pay for suicide pills.
The government has to ration health care somehow. Currently that is done through prices – whether you pay for better insurance or you pay out of pocket. We cannot logically pay for every advanced treatment for people who are just holding on for dear life. If the odds are stacked against you even with the treatment, at some point the government will have to say, "We just can't cover that."
If they didn't, all patients would have access to all the most expensive treatments, even experimental. Costs would go through the roof, and the country would speed full throttle toward bankruptcy.
Is it a 'lie' to say that 'death panels' and losing our current insurance is written into the bill? Sure, but no one is saying that. People are merely looking beyond the promises and drawing logical conclusions.
However, it's much more politically effective to call people liars or claim they've been deceived than to acknowledge their thought process and address it rationally.
More references of interest:
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