The Health-Care Lie Machine
by Michelle Goldberg
The DailyBeast
GOP House members are claiming that government-mandated euthanasia is part of the Democrats’ health-care plan. Michelle Goldberg tracks down the source of the most outrageous myths.
If you are a connoisseur of conservative media, then you’ve probably heard that health-care reform threatens to lead us toward a totalitarian dystopia in which the government kills off the old and unfit.
The revelations began two weeks ago, when Betsy McCaughey, the former New York lieutenant governor, spoke on Fred Thompson’s radio show about the “vicious assault on elderly people and the boomer generation” in the House health-care bill. Congress, she said, would make it “mandatory, absolutely required, 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, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care. And by the way, the bill expressly says that if you get sick somewhere in that five-year period… you have to go through that session again, all to do what’s in society’s best interests or your family’s best interests and cut your life short.”
One congressman said of his GOP colleagues, “Do they have somebody crank out the talking points for them, and they’re so marinated in them that they can’t separate truth from fiction?”
Soon, news of the impending systematic euthanasia of the aged was ricocheting around the right wing. On July 23, House Republican Leader John Boehner and his colleague Thaddeus McCotter released a statement charging that a provision in the health-care bill “may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.” Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox News last week, Dick Morris called the plan “creeping euthanasia.” The next day, Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx stood on the floor of the House and said that the GOP’s plan was “pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” On July 29, The Washington Times editorialized, “Back on May 1, we warned you that President Obama's health-care proposals could lead to bureaucrats deciding when to ‘pull the plug’ on an individual's medical treatment. That awful day is drawing nearer.”
(Continued here.)
The DailyBeast
GOP House members are claiming that government-mandated euthanasia is part of the Democrats’ health-care plan. Michelle Goldberg tracks down the source of the most outrageous myths.
If you are a connoisseur of conservative media, then you’ve probably heard that health-care reform threatens to lead us toward a totalitarian dystopia in which the government kills off the old and unfit.
The revelations began two weeks ago, when Betsy McCaughey, the former New York lieutenant governor, spoke on Fred Thompson’s radio show about the “vicious assault on elderly people and the boomer generation” in the House health-care bill. Congress, she said, would make it “mandatory, absolutely required, 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, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care. And by the way, the bill expressly says that if you get sick somewhere in that five-year period… you have to go through that session again, all to do what’s in society’s best interests or your family’s best interests and cut your life short.”
One congressman said of his GOP colleagues, “Do they have somebody crank out the talking points for them, and they’re so marinated in them that they can’t separate truth from fiction?”
Soon, news of the impending systematic euthanasia of the aged was ricocheting around the right wing. On July 23, House Republican Leader John Boehner and his colleague Thaddeus McCotter released a statement charging that a provision in the health-care bill “may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.” Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox News last week, Dick Morris called the plan “creeping euthanasia.” The next day, Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx stood on the floor of the House and said that the GOP’s plan was “pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” On July 29, The Washington Times editorialized, “Back on May 1, we warned you that President Obama's health-care proposals could lead to bureaucrats deciding when to ‘pull the plug’ on an individual's medical treatment. That awful day is drawing nearer.”
(Continued here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home