Sign me up for Barack Obama’s death panel!

Deciding the fate of all those helpless Americans won't be an easy task. But I'm ready for the job

By Anne Lamott

Sign me up for Barack Obama's death panel!

Dear Mr. Obama,

Like many Americans, I was initially shocked upon hearing of your proposed death panels. But after a short cooling-off period, I have come around.

It troubled me at first to hear that your followers would be deciding the fate our grandparents — i.e., who would be rescued, and who would be thrown on the death pile. Then I began to wonder if there might be some sort of rebate program for those of us whose grandparents are all dead. Since no one in my family from this generation will need to be processed, I wonder if the government might be willing to pay $100 in savings per grandparent — sort of a variation on the “Cash for Clunkers.” You and your people would make it worthwhile for us not to have random old people lying around. It goes without saying that this would only include American grandparents. My mother’s father, John Wyles, died in Liverpool in 1933, and would therefore not qualify. I think we could all agree on this.

: Anne Lamott is the bestselling author of seven novels, including "Blue Shoe," "Crooked Little Heart" and "Rosie," and five works of nonfiction including "Grace (Eventually)," "Bird By Bird" and "Operating Instructions." Her new novel, "Imperfect Birds," came out in paperback in April 2011. She’s the mother of one son, 22, and a grandson, 2. More Anne Lamott

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Rationing is a reality of any plan to bring down healthcare costs

By Brendan Nyhan

To match Special Report USA-POLITICS/TEAPARTY

A Tea Party member carries a sign voicing his concern over "ObamaCare" during a rally marking the one-year anniversary of the movement in Troy, Michigan February 27, 2010. Some Tea Partiers say they can pinpoint the precise moment when they made it clear to the Republican Party they had no intention of being its lapdog. On a bright, brisk afternoon in mid-February, with snow still thick on the ground from storms that had battered Washington the week before, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele met with more than 50 members of the Tea Party, the Twitter Age conservative movement that is reshaping the U.S. political landscape. Picture taken February 27, 2010. To match Special Report USA-POLITICS/TEAPARTY. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST) (Credit: Â© Rebecca Cook / Reuters)

Topics:Death Panels, War Room, Healthcare Reform

This originally appeared at Brendan Nyhan’s blog.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the current debate over the healthcare reform is the way that conservative bloggers and pundits keep trying to find evidence to justify Sarah Palin’s false claims about a “death panel.”

The latest example comes from bloggers Ann Althouse, Jim Hoft, and Doug Ross, who claim that the decision by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to conduct a National Coverage Determination for the prostate cancer treatment Provenge is evidence of a “death panel” (Althouse headline: “Death panel”; Hoft: “HERE COME THE DEATH PANELS”; Ross: “sounds like a death panel to me”).

This argument is absurd on a number of levels. First, in terms of the specific claims about Provenge, CMS hasn’t denied coverage and experts say it’s unlikely they will do so at the end of the year-long process (see also Media Matters). The entire claim is based on speculation.

More important, even if CMS had already decided to deny coverage, it would not justify Palin’s statement. Here is the relevant passage again:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin’s language suggests that a “death panel” would determine whether individual patients receive care based on their “level of productivity in society.” This was — and remains — false. Denying coverage at a system level for specific treatments or drugs is not equivalent to “decid[ing], based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether [Palin's parents and baby with Down Syndrome] are worthy of health care” (see also Cato’s Michael Tanner). Those who try to redefine “death panels” in this way are attempting to move the goalposts in the debate. It’s the equivalent of pointing to buried Iraqi chemical shells from the 1980s as evidence for the Bush administration’s claims about WMD.

Finally, defining “death panels” as rationing of any sort is totally nonsensical. By that standard, there are government and private “death panels” throughout the healthcare system already. It’s true that Obama’s proposal is likely to increase rationing, but so would every other proposal to control the unsustainable trajectory of future healthcare spending. Under Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher plan, for instance, CBO projects that “[b]eneficiaries would… be likely to purchase less comprehensive health plans or plans more heavily managed than traditional Medicare” (my emphasis). Unfortunately, hysteria over “death panels” is preventing a necessary debate over which approach would be most effective and fair.

: Brendan Nyhan is a political scientist currently serving as a RWJ Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. More Brendan Nyhan

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For all its faults, the current bill establishes universal care, and there's no going back from that

By Gene Lyons

A group of around 60 people support health insurance reform during a rally in Rockville, Md. on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2009. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) (Credit: Jacquelyn Martin)

Topics:Healthcare Reform, Barack Obama, Death Panels, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann

Buyer’s remorse seems to be setting in among Democrats, even as the U.S. Senate is poised to vote (as I write this) on the most significant piece of social reform since the 1960s.

No less a figure than Dr. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman, wrote that, were he a senator, “I would not vote for the current healthcare bill. Any measure that expands private insurers’ monopoly over healthcare and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real healthcare reform.”

Dean’s reservations have been widely echoed on the left. The healthcare bill’s big winners, they complain, are the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and doctors. Because it lacks both the “public option” (a government-run insurance company competing with private ones to drive down costs) and the Medicare buy-in that was initially highly touted, then quickly shot down by Holy Joe Lieberman, some Democrats fear that the party is both providing inadequate coverage and setting itself up for a voter backlash.

Once the public realizes that the bill mandates everybody to buy private health insurance — pretty much the way everybody has to carry auto insurance — there’s sure to be unhappiness not only on the tea-party right, but also among working people who ordinarily lean Democratic. Politics Daily’s David Corn saw it coming. “I feel as if I’m watching a cheesy horror flick and some poor unsuspecting person is about to open the wrong door,” he wrote last September, “and you want to scream, ‘Hey, don’t open that door!’”

To be sure, the bill provides generous subsidies for individuals and small businesses currently unable to afford coverage. And it doesn’t kick in for a couple of years, when one hopes the current recession will be a bad memory.

Even so, Salon’s estimable Glenn Greenwald sees it as a sellout: “The healthcare bill,” he writes, “is one of the most flagrant advancements of … corporatism yet, as it bizarrely forces millions of people to buy extremely inadequate products from the private health insurance industry — regardless of whether they want it or, worse, whether they can afford it,” even with some subsidies.

MSNBC’s self-dramatizing Keith Olbermann goes further, vowing to become what the Russians used to call a “refusenik.” “I hereby pledge,” he announced, “that I will not buy this perversion of healthcare reform. Pass this at your peril, senators. And sign it at yours, Mr. President. I will not buy this insurance. Brand me a lawbreaker if you choose. Fine me if you will. Jail me if you must.”

As diverting a spectacle as that might be, for Democrats to heed such overheated rhetoric would be catastrophically foolish. Olbermann and others spent the 2008 primaries charging that Democrats skeptical of Barack Obama had racist motives. Now that he’s poised to sign the most far-reaching enhancement of the American social contract since Lyndon Johnson, President Obama has now been rendered impure in their eyes.

Here are a few truths: First, we’ve been living in a one-dollar, one-vote corporatized democracy for a long time. If this is news to you, then you’re probably also shocked to learn that the U.S. Constitution, by awarding two senators to each of what H.L. Mencken called “the cow states” — no insult to the cows in my own barn — was deliberately crafted to make fundamental change difficult. Who made “moderates” like Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Joe Lieberman of Aetna mini-presidents? Alas, the founding fathers did.

Living in such a polity, anybody who thought entrenched interests like the insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries weren’t going to find ways to make money off healthcare reform probably wasn’t paying attention back at the beginning, when Obama said that despite the abstract appeal of a Canadian-style single-payer system, it was a political non-starter. As Greenwald points out, that told you right there that the White House was going to settle for the best corporate compromise it could get.

Sure, there’s a risk of backlash. The problem is no universal or near-universal health-insurance plan — public or private — can be voluntary. Mandates are, well, mandatory to prevent opportunists from gaming the system: Buying insurance only after they get sick. Nobody can insure “previously existing conditions” if clients come and go at will.

Insurers forbidden by law from canceling policies also need a base of healthy rate payers. Public or private, it’s a two-way street; costs can’t be cut without a bigger risk pool.

Indeed, a gradual counter-backlash seems likelier, as all but the most perfervid tea partiers gradually recognize that their families are more secure, and that none of the GOP scare stories — “death panels,” rationing, etc. — have any basis in reality. Retreat now is unthinkable. Imperfections notwithstanding, once universal coverage is established in principle, there’ll be no going back.

: Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com. More Gene Lyons

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Prominent figure in the Southern Baptist church apologizes for equating Zeke Emanuel with a Nazi doctor

By Alex Koppelman

Topics:Death Panels, Healthcare Reform, War Room

Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League have been getting some criticism for not doing more to speak out against the comparisons some people are making between Obama administration figures and Nazis. In New York magazine, for instance, Peter Keating wrote an article asking why organizations like the ADL hadn’t done more, or hadn’t been more effective, in countering the suggestions, saying, “[I]njecting Hitler analogies into subjects like Medicare reimbursement rates renders the Holocaust mundane, as though Nazis simply supported big government, rather than genocide.”

Seems like the ADL may have gotten the message.

The first example in Keating’s article was something that Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said recently: “I want to put it to you bluntly. What they are attempting to do in health care, particularly in treating the elderly, is not something like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did.” Land also said he was giving “the Dr. Jose Mengele Award” to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and medical ethicist who’s also the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and an advisor to the White House on healthcare reform. (I’ve written before about the various falsehoods being spread about Emanuel; you can read that post here.)

As Keating pointed out, that comparison to the Nazis, and of Emanuel to Mengele, a man who doomed untold numbers to death and performed gruesome medical experiments on live victims, a man so cruel that even at Auschwitz he became known as the Angel of Death, drew no public response from “any major Jewish organization.”

Well, apparently ADL national director Abraham Foxman wrote to Land on Oct. 9 about the latter’s comments, and the two spoke by phone. Land has now written a letter of apology to Land in which he says:

It was never my intention to equate the Obama administration’s healthcare reform proposals with anything related to the Holocaust. My concern, which is clear when the remarks are reviewed in context, was about the potential denial of healthcare to the elderly, the infirm, the disabled and the unborn…

Now that I have had the opportunity to speak with you personally and reflect on my words, I deeply regret the reference to Dr. Josef Mengele. I was using hyperbole for effect and never intended to actually equate anyone in the Obama administration with Dr. Mengele. I will certainly refrain from making such references in the future. I apologize to everyone who found such references hurtful. Given the pain and suffering of so many Jewish and other victims of the Nazi regime, I will certainly seek to exercise far more care in my use of language in future discussions of the issues at stake in the healthcare debate.

(Hat tip to Ben Smith.)

Notably, of course, Land didn’t apologize for the substance of his comments, and reiterated allegations about the Obama administration’s proposals that are demonstrably false. And he doesn’t seem to have apologized to Emanuel himself.

: Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon. More Alex Koppelman

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Republicans are congratulating themselves for their "principled" opposition. Who do they think they're fooling?

By Andrew Leonard

People tape posters, featuring altered photos of U.S. President Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler, to a table at a town hall meeting on healthcare reform sponsored by U.S. Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) in Alhambra, California, August 11, 2009.

Topics:Death Panels, Healthcare Reform, Republican Party, Town Hall Protests, How the World Works

There it was, in broad daylight on my computer screen, a Wall Street Journal headline so shocking in its brazen embrace of an alternate reality that despite my best interests for mental self-preservation, I was forced to react.

The GOP strategy of principled opposition is winning over independents.

You can call the GOP strategy a lot of things, including, no question, “effective.” But the one word you cannot use to describe it is “principled.” When Sarah Palin talks about “death panels” and Sen. Chuck Grassley warns about “pulling the plug on grandma,” they are not being “principled.” They are consciously lying for political gain. In my dictionary, that is the opposite of “principled.”

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint has even gone so far as to say the U.S. is “where Germany was before World War II,” making, it would seem, an extraordinary analogy between President Obama and Adolf Hitler. It seems incredible, but then you see the posters waved by protesters at town hall meetings featuring Obama as an SS trooper, and you realize that DeMint is being taken at his word by a significant fraction of the general populace.

Yes, the GOP went there. So let’s go there too.

Over my break, I started reading Ron Chernow’s engrossing “The Warburgs,” a history of the German Jewish banking family that was probably second only to the Rothschilds in its international success. In the early 1920s, when the Nazi Party was still only a minor player in German politics, the Warburgs became a target for vicious propaganda. Among numerous other sins, the Warburgs were blamed for directly contributing to Germany’s defeat in World War I.

With Jews suddenly prominent in so many areas, the Nazis could hold them responsible for every novelty from industrial consolidation to financial speculation to avant-garde thought … In this atmosphere, it no longer sufficed to charge the Warburgs with isolated acts of betrayal. Now every random fact of their existence had to be closely spun into a fantastic conspiracy … The theory was infinitely elastic, weaving every thread of Warburg history into a lurid tapestry. The Nazis didn’t worry about internal contradictions. The Warburgs were secret stooges both of Wall Street and Russian revolutionaries … The point was not to be accurate but to breed suspicion and confusion … No lie was too preposterous or fantastic.

In 1925, Adolf Hitler described this propaganda technique in “Mein Kampf” as “the big lie.”

[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

What makes that passage so monstrously mind-bending is that Hitler was accusing the Jews of engaging in the big lie, when in fact the Nazis would be history’s greatest practitioners. Jim DeMint suddenly appears in a different light, because he is actually deadly accurate when he compares the present climate to pre-WWII Germany. The GOP’s avid willingness to wield the big lie makes the comparison valid.