Jul 29 2009, 11:51AM
The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Betsy McCaughey
One of the wackier developments in the recent health care debate has been the sudden return of Betsy McCaughey. Fifteen years ago McCaughey wrote an error-laden piece for the New Republic, a piece the magazine later recanted, that became a rallying cry of the successful effort to kill Clintoncare, and that McCaughey parlayed into a short-lived career as the lieutenant governor of New York. McCaughey's health-care shtick in 1994 was to brag about having read all 1,000-plus pages of the bill and cite, with Biblical certainty, obscure provisions that made the Clintons look like serial killers.
And now McCaughey is back. And her shtick, like a bug trapped in the amber of the Clinton years, is to brag about having read the entire bill, while pointing to obscure provisions that make all that Obama campaign stuff about hope and change look like an excuse to get into office and start knocking off the elderly. Here she is in the Wall Street Journal, citing page numbers in various bills to equate comparative effectiveness research with "limiting care based on the patient's age." Here she is on Fox News, dropping page numbers to claim that the congressional plan will force you out of your current insurance program. And here she is on Fred Thompson's radio show, ostentatiously citing her reading of the bill to make the claim that "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,"
That last claim about required government euthanasia counseling -- repeated hundreds of times in dozens of places over the past week -- is worth lingering over. I confess I have not read the entire House bill and, honestly, I have no plans on doing so. (Life is short, even without considering Obama's plans to euthanize us all.) But McCaughey's claim has the distinct whiff of bullshit, and I am moderately capable of using Google. So allow me to report, after five minutes of searching and reading the relevant section of the bill: There is absolutely nothing about a "required counseling session." Nothing. There is a requirement that Medicare cover the session if you haven't had it in the past five years but, naturally, that doesn't mean you are required to take advantage of the coverage. (And, by the way, the sessions in question would cover dozens of dull, informational topics besides scandalous end-of-life care.)
So it turns out that what Betsy McCaughey says is not true. But what I'm more interested in is the cruel paradox presented by a character like McCaughey: I realize that I am playing into her trap by giving her ridiculous pap additional attention. Is there a good way around that? I don't know. I do think there are people making good arguments against health-care reform -- among them Arnold Kling and Greg Mankiw and my colleague Megan McCardle. McCaughey is not one of them. The best I can do is say that her schtick about page counts and euthanasia is getting old.
Great piece. She's a true character. A larger agenda is at work here that coincides with efforts by the "pro-life" agenda to prevent the spread of assisted suicide, now legal in three states. www.religiondispatches.com A little self-serving, I'm sorry, but I've got a post up there today about euthanasia and the religious right.
One only needs to look as far as the user comments section of many news web sites to see the hysteria boiling over among the anti-intellectual crowd. They're passing along all of these fabrications and dire warnings of impending doom if health care reform is passed.
The fact that this kind of attack works at all is a sad reflection of the lack of critical thinking skills among a large segment of our population.
Dear Mr. Clarke:
Your article is well-written and revealing. Thank you.
In the last few months while following the healthcare debate it strikes me that there are an awful lot of opponents
just like Betsy McCaughey. Highly-vocal. Often very nasty and mean. Fear-mongering. Blatantly dishonest.
How is it that people like McCaughey, Glen Beck, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lou
Dobbs and others like them get away with this stuff? It seems that every day I am confronted with another report
like yours that one of these characters is spewing forth unfounded drivel.
And then it hit me. These types have always existed. I just never knew about them. Or suspected that they could be
so dishonest. And now suddenly, it seems, I can track them and their malarkey via the net as easily as I can track
the Dow or monitor the box scores of my favorite baseball team.
For me, at least, this fits in the 'all-good' category. While it is unfortunate that serious policy debate is
influenced by the sort of fringe rabble-rousing which McCaughey represents, its effects diminish with repeated
exposure.
We Americans believe deeply in the democratizing effect of free-flowing information. Never before have we witnessed
or participated at this level or depth of information flow. The Internet has enabled a discourse that spans the
globe in its breadth and with a few clicks enables drill downs into source data with speed and ease never before
imagined.
You mentioned that you were able within minutes to resource information buried deep inside the current legislative
proposals that exposes the dishonesty in McCaughey's protestations. Imagine living in the 60's. To accomplish the
same thing would have been utterly impossible.
It may be that the really big story underneath the current healthcare debate is this really big shift in the quality
of the discourse. Sure, we still have the fringe. But we can confidently dismiss it with very little effort.
Others still may listen and act on what they hear, however inaccurate. Yet, the net effect could be huge.
Take heart. And thank you for your contributions.
this mccaughey is an evil woman who delights in denying care to 50 million americans based on lies. how does she sleep at night and look herself in the mirror (with that terrible, horrible face of hers). who does she think she is?
So let me get this straight, dude.
You found that your complete ignorance of the bill and your lack of desire to make any effort to read it were of absolutely no hindrance in pumping out a 500-word screed vilifying someone who has not only done so, but supports her arguments with references and facts.
Nice.
You argue only with emotion expressed as personal hatred.
Skiritae
@Skiritae: I'm afraid your analysis is flawed. Mr. Clarke is not "completely ignorant." He admits only to not having read the ENTIRE bill. He claims to have researched the relevant sections, and his results were completely inconsistent with Ms. McCaughey's. He concluded that she's dead wrong. That's a substantive argument, and not one based "only on emotion."
Funny. When I saw her on the Daily Show she didn't say what you say she said.
She said the Obamacare bill would penalize doctors if they did not have the required counseling sessions where elderly people would be encouraged to consider alternatives to life-prolonging treatments.
Your piece is simply another tired example of the smug idiocy of parochial progressives hiding in the caves of your own threadbare civic religion. It is obvious to anyone that Obamacare intends to save money by eliminating innovation and encouraging old people and other socially devalued people to do without treatments that many of them could afford if you did not eliminate private medical markets and loot them of their savings.
The internet has bypassed you. People are no longer dependent on Chris Matthews and other revolving door flaks, who move back and forth from providing PR for politicians as government employees to doing the same thing as faux "journalists." It is obvious to a majority of the American people that government control of medicine will mean rationing and waiting lists, which means making people die by denying them care that some of them could afford on their own now, and even more could afford if you were not already driving up costs and reducing competition by current government intervention in the medical care and health insurance markets. Your failures, from the Indian Health Service to public education to the postal service to the VA hospitals to collapsing bridges and tunnels are legion and obvious.
Get the hell out of the way you stupid demwit fascists. It looks like we need to move beyond Townhalls and Tea Parties to citizens tribunals and guillotines to free humanity from you tax predator parasitic scum.
BruceMajors:
If you actually read the article, it does not actually reference the Daily Show appearance (this could possibly have something to do with the fact that the appearance took place three weeks after the article was written). And yet you reference the fact that she offered a different argument as though you mean to imply that she had not made the claims that were well-referenced in the article. (I may be inferring too much, but one gets the impression that your admiration of McCaughey includes attempting to emulate her misdirection tactics to play fast and loose with the truth.)
All the same, the fact that you can cite her claim made in the interview with Jon Stewart does not make her claim true. It is just as devoid of facts and evidence as the claims cited in the article. No such penalties exist in the text - and I have seen it. As Mr. Clarke notes, rational arguments can be made against the current version of "health care reform," but McCaughey prefers lies and distortions, and perhaps that is because there are so many that share her political biases that they willingly shut down their critical thinking faculties and rise to the emotions that her lies incite (more than they would a sensible, fact-based or economic argument).
Further, I must note that it is NOT "obvious to anyone that Obamacare intends to save money by eliminating innovation and encouraging old people and other socially devalued people to do without treatments." This conclusion is only "obvious" to those who let their partisanship provoke absurd, emotional responses (an equivalent on the left is to argue that Bush's mishandling of Katrina was based on racism rather than incompetence brought on by cronyism - appointing unqualified people to responsible positions). That is an entirely irrational conclusion - why on earth would anyone undertake as politically explosive an endeavor as health care reform with the INTENTION of care becoming more scarce? Economic factors might well make that an UNINTENDED result, but it defies all logical thought to conclude that this is Obama's goal. (With rare, but sometimes notable, exceptions, the greatest danger posed by government programs is inefficiency or incompetence, not evil intentions.)
It is dismaying and frightening to see the debate on such an important issue brought down to such facile name calling and simple lies, as represented by the tactics of McCaughey and those (like yourself) who applaud and imitate this dishonest behavior. If those who embrace such tactics fail to kill the reform, they will be as much to blame for the new system's failings as those who support it. The McCaugheys of the world make it far too easy for the architects of the legislation to paint most opposition as lunatics screaming out conspiracy theories. What is needed is rational argumentation about the actual shortcomings of the proposed legislation, not shrill cries about made-up bogeymen supposedly lurking in the text.
Please, no more nonsense about "death panels" and "penalizing" doctors for not planning elderly patients' early demise. It's all lies told by kooks. How about an honest debate about what the costs would be, how much coverage from a public option would drive private insurers out of business, what impact the law would have on innovation, and other such reality-based questions that MUST be asked?
Oh, and as a p.s. - it's amusing to see you refer to (who? journalists? politicians?) as "demwit [sic] fascists" and then go on to propose brown shirt-like tactics like "citizens tribunals and guillotines." Please keep your mob rules mentality off our democracy.
P.P.S. - You do realize that public education is under control of states and local jurisdictions, right? And why does everyone trot out the postal service as a government failure? It's not my idea of a good time to wait in lines in the post office, but the fact is that, despite all its many faults, we do have one of the cheapest, most reliable postal services in the world. If you think otherwise, your experience with the rest of the world is too limited to give your opinion much weight.
I have been following Betsy McCaughey on twitter (@REALMcCaughey)http://twitter.com/REALMcCaughey
She has been doing an excellent job of reading the bills and reporting what evil lurks inside. Did you know:
Page #564: MANDATORY GAY MARRIAGE. You will be required to GAY MARRY regardless of a prediliction for muffdivery or not!
Page #786: Obama will SWALLOW YOUR GRANDMA WHOLE.
Page #75: "Upon expiration of mandate period TRIG PALIN shall be presented to the Cthulhu on bed of radicchio"
Page #90: Over $890m in subsidies for NAMBLA over 10 years! Funded by cuts 2 SENIORS H1N1 flu vaccines!
Page #467: "$40m reduction in Seniors Orthopedic Care to be reallocated to LOBBYING for NOBEL PRIZE!"
Page #890: An excellent recipe for CASSEROLE
She has even exposed secret deals/concessions to the GOP, hidden in the 1000+pages. For example, GOP Leader John Boehner slipped in a mandate for "Vitamin D sunlight treatment lamps" to be obtainable at a subsidized cost to members of congress.
Is that what the PEOPLE meant by BIPARTISANSHIP??? Betsy twittered that "two million Americans" came to the capitol for the Tea Party on 9/12. That's even more than Glenn Beck said, so Betsy must be even righter. If we can get even a fraction of the billions of people who believe what she writes, we could actually take over the world.
Please Thank Betsy for all of her hard work over at REALMcCaughey on twitter!
Sincerely,
notsofreshfeelings.blogspot.com