Myths and falsehoods about health care reform

Arm yourself with the facts when encountering lunatics from Planet Wingnutia. Each right-wing myth is fully debunked at the link.

Myths and falsehoods about health care reform
Media Matters for America identifies and debunks 14 myths and falsehoods surrounding the health care reform debate.

MYTH 1: There is no health care crisis

MYTH 2: Health care reform will impose rationing

MYTH 3: Health care reform provides for euthanasia, "death panel"

MYTH 4: Health care reform legislation will cover undocumented immigrants

MYTH 5: Health care reform will raise your taxes

MYTH 6: Health care reform would tax all small businesses

MYTH 7: Health care reform would add $1 trillion-plus to deficit

MYTH 8: House bill would ban private individual insurance

MYTH 9: Obama said he didn't read House bill

MYTH 10: Co-ops are an adequate substitute for a public option

MYTH 11: Obama is pushing a system like the U.K. and Canada

MYTH 12: Obama, Dems pushing "socialized medicine"

MYTH 13: Prominent opponents of health care reform are credible

MYTH 14: Government can't run a health care program

Artie60438 wrote:

Arm yourself with the facts when encountering lunatics from Planet Wingnutia. Each right-wing myth is fully debunked at the link.

Myths and falsehoods about health care reform
Media Matters for America identifies and debunks 14 myths and falsehoods surrounding the health care reform debate.

MYTH 1: There is no health care crisis

MYTH 2: Health care reform will impose rationing

MYTH 3: Health care reform provides for euthanasia, "death panel"

MYTH 4: Health care reform legislation will cover undocumented immigrants

MYTH 5: Health care reform will raise your taxes

MYTH 6: Health care reform would tax all small businesses

MYTH 7: Health care reform would add $1 trillion-plus to deficit

MYTH 8: House bill would ban private individual insurance

MYTH 9: Obama said he didn't read House bill

MYTH 10: Co-ops are an adequate substitute for a public option

MYTH 11: Obama is pushing a system like the U.K. and Canada

MYTH 12: Obama, Dems pushing "socialized medicine"

MYTH 13: Prominent opponents of health care reform are credible

MYTH 14: Government can't run a health care program

Another News Flash from Comedy Central?

LoisLane wrote:

Another News Flash from Comedy Central?

Any actual rebuttal? Or just more of the usual?

Heretic wrote:

LoisLane wrote:

Another News Flash from Comedy Central?

Any actual rebuttal? Or just more of the usual?

...another tactful response from Mr. Wizzard...

We're still waiting.

Heretic wrote:

We're still waiting.

Don't loose any sleep over it, Mr. Wizzard...

Hey Wiz...you can pick up Artie and go to the rally...

Quote :

Obama health care opposition to rally on Saturday

GREGORY TEJEDA - Times Correspondent

LANSING | A Lansing woman who felt she was denied the ability to share her conservative thoughts opposing the Obama administration's health care reform plan at a recent forum is planning her own rally Saturday.

The event, coordinated by Linda Lager will take place at 11 a.m. at Lan-Oak Park, 2550 178th St. The rally will move to the adjacent Eisenhower Center in the event of inclement weather.

Linda Lager attended the forum hosted earlier this week by U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., to discuss the Obama's health care reform proposal.

Lager said event was, "very well coordinated and staged" to present Obama's opinion over all others. Lager said her own attempts to ask questions that night were stifled because she did not sign her name to the questions she submitted to have answered.

"The forum was open to everyone from the district and beyond," Jackson spokesman Rick Bryant said. "We publicized it well in advance with a press advisory through our e-newsletter and by automated phone calls. There was nothing orchestrated. The congressman presented a fact-based PowerPoint presentation and then he took as many questions from the audience as time allowed. He drew the questions at random from a big bowl in front of the audience. Some of the questions were from people who were opposed to the health care plan."

Nonetheless, the forum motivated Lager to coordinate the Saturday rally. While her event is not strictly devoted to the health care debate, Lager said she expects the issue to come up, along with other issues she believes are related to "freedom, liberty and individuality."

The rally is expected to last about an hour and will involve speeches about conservative issues.

The keynote speaker will be Kimberly Fletcher, the founder of Homemakers for America. Entertainment will be performed by Christian singer Sarah Van Drunen of Munster .

Lager said she hopes the rally will turn into an educational session to let people who might not closely follow government know how to contact their elected officials to share their opinions.

"We're going to be telling people that if they don't like what they're hearing from government, call their congressman," Lager said.

...what do ya think?

Even Glenn Beck understands how damaging our current health care system is to small businesses.

Brave New Films wrote:

Before leaving for his “vacation” this week, Beck taped a show about small businesses and the struggles they’re having staying ahead. The show, aired August 17, got around to Beck asking some small businessmen about their health care costs. This extraordinary passage followed.

BECK: I just had a meeting with my staff, because I’m a small business owner, my company’s called Mercury, and we’re an entertainment company, we do all kinds of stuff. And I cover 100% health care. And we have the best that we could get for New York. This year, I think our health care went up 40% and then the next year it was up like 47%. And they keep taking away options. This year when we renewed, the health care provider came into my office and he said, “Are you really going to pick that?” And I said, “Well, yes, as long as I can.” And he said, “You are the last person in the state of New York that is covering your employees like this.” And I said, “Well, I just had a meeting with my employees and I said, ‘I don’t know how long I can do that, but we’ll do it as long as we possibly can.’” But they’re making it impossible. Does anybody else find it impossible? They make it impossible for you to do the right thing for your employees!

Beck doesn’t want to fill in the “they” there, and I’m sure he figures his viewers will just substitute “government”. But of course, the unnamed “they” is, clearly, the private insurance market and the health care industry in general. There has been no limit on their growth, no effort to control costs, and in fact the incentives go in the opposite direction. And it’s crushing small businesses. Even GLENN BECK understands that. Without any need for competition, with regional monopolies across the country, with no meaningful checks on their power at the federal level, insurance companies can charge more and more for premiums and deny enough care to enough people to make exorbitant profits that allow them to pay CEOs hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, stock options and perks.

http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/

Health Insurance Premiums Have Increased 119% Over The Last Decade

Quote :

Although many right-wingers will tell you that the current health care system works fine, the majority of Americans are happy with the plan they already have, and only a small number of uninsured people would benefit from reform....we know that's just not true.

With health spending projected to double if we don't enact real reform, middle and lower income families are at high risk of losing their health coverage--or facing an impending future of stagnant incomes.

Premiums are eating up middle-class incomes: Over the past decade, insurance premiums have been rising in cost at a much greater rate than income in the U.S...and not by a small amount. A recent report by the non-profit, non-partisan Commonwealth Fund found that premiums have been ballooned so much that employer-sponsored health coverage for families has increased by 119 percent between 1999 and 2008.

What's even scarier: The report determined that rates could jump by 94 percent in the coming decade if cost growth continues on its current course--to $23,842 per family.

The fellas over at the Denialism blog came back with a wonderful post on the depths Republicans are resorting to in lieu of an actual debate on the topics:

Quote :

Two major new issues for denialism have cropped up, and both are major new forms of political denialism. The first, I'll broadly describe as Obama-denialism. Obama is a muslim, Obama was not born in the US, there is a giant conspiracy involving the Hawaii Secretary of State, the Democratic Party and muslims worldwide to take over the US government with a madrassa-trained presidential double agent etc. These are of course nonsense. FighttheSmears a website created by Obama supporters has most of the more ridiculous rumors debunked, including the absurd birth certificate/birther conspiracy theory. appropriately mocking LA Times blog entry. Whatever. As readers of denialism blog, it should have been clear from the get-go that this is just the usual conspiracist-drivel propagated by people who are upset at having a black president, and, just like the truthers, holocaust deniers, AIDS denialists, or any other group driven by racism, paranoia or just plain stupidity they won't be satisfied by any evidence that contradicts their illogical conclusions. The format of the arguments is prima-facie absurd. The conspiracies are non-parsimonious, and lead immediately to more questions that just don't make any sense. Despite this, bigots and crackpots like Fox News and Lou Dobbs "cover the controversy" to keep it stirred up. We must address it for what it is, closet racism and sour grapes over losing an election.

The second major issue, even more distressing to me now that I'm fully immersed in our health-care system, is that of universal health care denialism. Most upsetting to me was pronouncements like that of Sarah Palin that health care reform will lead to "death panels". This is where the political opponents of progressive governance have crossed the line from the usual political ignorance and lies to truly despicable tactics designed to sink health care reform at any cost. The reality of the language originally in the bill was that it was designed to encourage physicians to have end-of-life discussions with their patients by paying them for such consultations. This is an area in which our health system currently fails miserably to the detriment of our patients. We truly need to have all patients interacting with our health system to have frank discussions about their wishes at the end of their lives, to have living wills, and make their desires for their level of intervention clear before they end up in the ICU, on a ventilator, and having invasive treatments performed ad nauseum that they may or may not approve of if they were able to communicate their wishes. But no, the political opponents of health care reform have instigated a scorched-earth policy, and even something as noncontroversial as asking people what they want their physicians to do when they're sick has been thrown under the bus by the denialists. Other lies? Universal health care reform will turn us into communist Russia! A belief inconsistent with the fact that every other country in the industrialized world has survived the conversion to universal systems without requiring Stalinist dictatorships to enforce the dastardly public option. These arguments transcend mere denialism and can only be described as ideological insanity.

There is a legitimate debate to be had over health care, but we clearly are not having it. One legitimate question is how do we pay for it? I'm confident that reform will pay for itself and it is more expensive not to have universal access. As we discussed in our health care series, every other country in the world has accomplished this feat, provide equivalent or measurably better care in terms of access, health of populations, and life expectancy. Despite their universal coverage they all spend less than half as much per capita than the US on health coverage. Having people access the system in our ERs, lacking preventative care, and failing to provide the universal inexpensive interventions costs more than just providing care to people. After all, we already pay for the uninsured, hospitals and doctors are ethically obligated to provide care for everyone who walks in the door, insured or not. The costs of covering the uninsured are already built into our excess costs. Worse, having a administrative system designed to deny care is costly and unnecessary. The "privatization" or "subcontracting' of medicare administration under Bush increased the cost of healthcare administration by 30% in three years despite the number of patients covered increasing by only about 4%. Paying for things in a planned, thoughtful and systematic way is cheaper than allowing problems to stew and boil over. I've already had way too many patients showing up in the ER with disastrous and expensive health problems requiring a huge expenditure of resources that if they had been addressed early would have cost next to nothing. And yes, they always tell me they didn't get it addressed before it was critical because they lacked insurance. This is stupid and not the kind of care I want to be providing. Another legitimate question is will universality damage our technological and research prowess? Again I believe the answer is no. The US has excellent technology and research because we pay for it through government agencies like the NIH. The technology won't go away because that has more to do with the culture of our healthcare system than the fact that we have oodles of money to pay for it (because we don't really). It's also not a fact that our technology necessarily makes our care better. CT scans, and MRIs are not as important to provision of health care as having ready access to services and adequate access to primary care physicians and preventative care. Another good question, is a public option necessary? Again I believe not. While I believe countries that provide a public option like Australia are ones on which we may model our system, other countries such as the Netherlands or Germany have developed excellent healthcare systems through insurers by tightly regulating them and not letting them screw their citizens. Here's a great question, would anyone under these systems choose the US one? As evinced by the commentary from our health system, the critics of universal healthcare are speaking from ignorance when they claim citizens of other countries are suffering in their systems. The data we presented, and reinforced by commentary from all over the world, was that these systems have problems, but no one in their right mind would trade them for the US system.

Let's get back to having a public debate that is not overwhelmed by the ideological fanatics and deniers and instead focus on the very real and critical problems that this president was elected to address. The denialists and their scorched earth tactics have done a great deal of harm to our debate on reform. Now more than ever, we need to talk about the difference between denialism and debate.

The Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate

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

2. No chemo for older medicare patients.

3. Illegal immigrants will get free health insurance.

4. Death panels will decide who lives.

5. The government will set doctors' wages.