He Can't Be Bothered

We've all heard about the Florida doctor who taped a sign in a window directing people who voted for Obama should "seek urologic help elsewhere" (noting cleverly that "Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years"). The good doctor, of course, is free to do as he likes, and I certainly take no issue with him critiquing health care reform, nor with his "warning off" patients. What I do find concerning is that the doctor doesn't actually know what is in the health care bill. That's right. Although it's been online for months, apparently, tl;dr. In fact, as he told Alan Colmes, he opposes the bill because "I’m not the guy who wrote the plan." From the interview:

Cassell: Hospice cuts in 2012…Does the government want people to die slowly?
Colmes: Do you really think the government wants people dead?
Cassell: Well I think that they’re cutting all supportive care, like nursing homes, ambulance services…
Colmes: What to you mean they’re cutting nursing homes?
Cassell: They’re cutting nursing home reimbursements
Colmes: Isn’t what they’re cutting under the Medicare plan what was really double dipping; they were getting credits and they were getting to deduct them at the same time.
Cassell: Well you know, I can’t tell you exactly what the deal is.
Colmes: If you can’t tell us exactly what the deal is, why are you opposing it and fighting against it?
Cassell: I’m not the guy who wrote the plan.
Colmes: But if you don’t know what the deal is why are you speaking out against something you don’t know what the deal is?
Cassell: What I get online, just like any other American. What I’m supposed to understand about the bill should be available to me.
Colmes: It is; it’s been online for a long time; it’s also been all over the media…

In fact, the National Association of Home Care and Hospice praises much of the bill

Don't you rather expect a doctor to have an eye for details? Or at least to realize the significance of seeking evidence to support one's claims--of fact-checking--and of not assuming to know the truth or falsity of an issue based on hearsay? Of course we find this all over the place--well-educated people asserting "truths" that are certainly shaky or undeniably false, but, at least in terms of health care reform, this has become all-too common. As Steve Benen writes, "some of the loudest, angriest critics of the Affordable Care Act are also some of the least informed, most confused, embarrassingly ignorant observers anywhere." The question is, under media exposure, do these critics carry on asserting a questionable "truth", or do they revise their assertions in the face of evidence? Based on the media's history of privileging of the loudest, more notorious Obama critics--despite how ill-informed they might be--my guess is that the good doctor will continue to assert his version of "the truth," and he will enjoy another 12 minutes of fame.

H/T Balloon Juice

Words Fail

Sometimes you come across things so callous, you don't know how to respond. For example, see RNC Chairman Michael Steele's response to a young woman, Amanda Duzak, whose mother passed away from cancer six months ago. Following Steele's dismissal of Duzak as someone wanting a television moment, the woman was escorted from the event by security.

Ex-Cigna Executive on Health Care Rationing

Wendell Potter enjoyed a 20 year career with health insurance corporations, such as Humana and Cigna. At Cigna, he was Head of Corporate Communications; he retired from this post last year.

In June this year, he testified before a Senate committee investigating insurance (see his testimony here [pdf]). Before the committee, Potter asserted that,

companies routinely drop seriously ill policyholders so they can meet "Wall Street's relentless profit expectations."

"They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment," Potter said. "…(D)umping a small number of enrollees can have a big effect on the bottom line."(ABC News)

According to Potter, there there are three ways in which health insurance companies strive to maintain their companies' stock prices:

1) Rescission: "seizing upon a technicality to cancel the policy of someone who has been paying premiums" who then "gets cancer or another expensive disease" (Kristof).
2) Deny permission for expensive procedures
3) Raising premiums for a small business after am employee is diagnosed "with an illness that would be very expensive to treat. That forces the [small] business to drop coverage for all its employees or go elsewhere" (Kristof).

Blue Cross has used rescission "to cancel more than 20,000 policies over five years, saving the company $300 million in claims" (Kristof). Perhaps you recall the fury unleashed at Blue Cross last year (2008) when the public learned about the company's practice of "asking physicians in a letter to look for medical conditions that could be used to cancel patients' insurance coverage" (L A Times). The company had sent out 1,000 such letters per month "for years" before someone complained about it (L A Times). Blue Cross stopped its letter-writing campaign when it became known.

If you, who pay your premiums dutifully, are diagnosed with a disease, and your insurer tells you that the cost of treatment exceeds your policy (or they deem treatment as "experimental" and, therefore, ineligible for coverage), or if you lose your job and, consequently, your health insurance benefits, or if a colleague becomes ill and forces your employer to drop all coverage, what then?

Added: A subsidiary of WellPoint, Anthem Blue Cross, has just sent its customers an email warning of the horrors of a public option. This post, "WellPoint Calls Attention To Its Own Immoral Practices In Effort To Smear Health Reform," points our how WellPoint undermines its claims about health care reform.

John McCain: "Be Respectful"

You can disagree with a person, but you can still acknowledge that person as a human being and treat that person with courtesy and respect. John McCain showed us how it's done today.

Think back to his campaign, and when his audience would boo or shout when then-Senator Obama's name came up. Senator McCain would chastize his audience and insist on Obama's decency.

Today, Senator McCain held a town hall for seniors in Sun City, Arizona. When an attendee claimed that President Obama's health care plan is "against the Constitution," and asked "Doesn't he know that we live under the Constitution?'' McCain negated that statement and asked that people treat the President with respect. His audience responded by booing him. McCain certainly differs with Obama on most issues, but he won't cave to the audience and cater to its paranoias and conspiracy theories.

Further, when it appeared that a woman was trying to introduce a spot of "Birtherism" into the town hall by stating, out of the blue, that "we" should stand behind Representative Franks, he ignored her comment (as did the entire audience). Granted, the woman did not clarify why people should stand up for Representative Franks, but he's been in the news lately, and roundly mocked, for initially supporting, then backing away from, a Birther lawsuit. Today he signed onto the "Birther bill."

Anyway, it's great to see Senator McCain resisting the recent trend of demonization.

And the bit about health care reform being "against the Constitution"? Thanks go to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann for that one. It's a faulty claim, but it's the current one.

Rumor Central: Obamacare (Updated)

Taking a break from The Project to post some links regarding the plethora of rumors on health care reform.

1. For seniors concerned about Medicare and the fears of the government controlling "life and death decisions": the AARP has a page on "Myths vs. Facts"

2. "Health Insurance Reform Reality Check" addresses the claims that health insurance reform will:

-lead to a "government takeover" of health care or lead to "rationing."
-would encourage or even require euthanasia for seniors.
-will affect veterans' access to medical care.
-will harm small businesses.
-would be financed by cutting Medicare benefits.
-will force people out of their current insurance plans / force them to change doctors.

3. The rumors and distortions--on both sides--have kept Factcheck.org pretty busy. See the entries under:

"Health Care"
"Health Insurance"

4. The Truth-O-Meter at Politifact goes wild in the "Health" category.

5. The Associated Press fact checks rumors about "death panels" and clarifies the bill's statements on advanced care planning.

6. The Institute for Southern Studies corrects some of the misinformation presented by, among others, The Liberty Counsel (you can see the Liberty Counsel's full list of talking points here. This list appears to be one of the sources for Sarah Palin's much debunked claim about government run "death panels").

Note: Politifact approached the Liberty Counsel about a particularly specious claim on the list: that the health care bill "'will establish school-based 'health' clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!". . .the bills now before the House say nothing about the school clinics being able to offer abortions." Politifact "spoke with Sarah Speller at the Liberty Counsel, who told us that the group had been getting a lot of calls about the memo and that everyone there was very busy as a result. However, she assured us that 'as far as our office can tell, everything in the overview is accurate. That's about all I can tell you,' she said. 'I'm just relaying what I've been told to say.' [Politifact] see no language in the three main versions of the bill that would allow school-based clinics, which have a long history of providing basic health services to underprivileged students, to provide abortions. Nor would the clinics even be new — they have been around for three decades. So we rate the claim Pants on Fire!

7. McClatchy publishes "Headed to a health care 'town brawl?' Read this first," a brief guide to wild claims about health care reform.

8. C Q Politics does a decent job at "Vetting the Health Care Rhetoric."

9. Factcheck has a fresh entry tackling a chain-email currently making the rounds: "Twenty-Six Lies About H. R. 3200." Factcheck notes that the email makes 48 claims. Of these, 26 are demonstrably false, 18 are misleading, and 4 are true.

If you find yourself in a muddle from all the misinformation floating about, the sites included above offer some clarity.

And it's back to The Project.