Voices From The Wilderness

Look at this, a media organization bothered to interview some of the people suffering the most under the current health care system!

Such scaremongering has dismayed and infuriated Sharon Lee, the doctor who now treats Manley in Kansas City. "I'm very angry, very angry," she says. "Many of the people I treat have already been in front of a death panel and have lost – a death panel controlled by insurance companies. I see people dying at least monthly because we have been unable to get them what they needed."

Lee's clinic, Family Health Care, is a refuge of last resort. It picks up the pieces of lives left shattered by a health system that has failed them, and tries to glue them back together. It exists largely outside the parameters of formal health provision, raising funds through donations and paying all its 50 staff – Lee included – a flat rate of just $12 an hour [...]

Beth Gabaree, who came in to see Lee for the first time this morning, has experiences that sound extreme but are in fact quite typical. She has diabetes and a heart condition. Until two years ago they were controlled through ongoing treatment paid for by her husband's work-based health insurance. But he was in a motorbike crash that pulverised his right leg and put him out of work.

That Catch 22 again: no work, no insurance, no treatment. Except in this case it was Beth who went without treatment, in order to put her husband's dire needs first. He receives ongoing specialist care that costs them $500 a go, leaving nothing for her. So she stopped seeing a doctor, and effectively began self-medicating. She cut down from two different insulin drugs to regulate her diabetes to one, and restricted her heart drugs. "I do what I think I need to do to keep four steps out of hospital. I know that's not the right thing, but I can't justify seeing the doctor when my family's already in money trouble."

The problem is that she hasn't kept herself four steps out of hospital. Her health deteriorated and earlier this year she became bedridden. Even then, it took her family several days to persuade her to go to the emergency room because she didn't want to incur the hospital costs. "It was hard enough without that," she says.

After an initial consultation, Lee has now booked Gabaree for a new round of tests for her diabetes and is arranging for free medication. "It's wonderful," Gabaree says. "I'm so blessed. I didn't know you could get this sort of help."

That she sees basic healthcare as a blessing, not as a right, speaks volumes about attitudes among the mass of the working poor. Also revealing is the fact that Gabaree has absolutely no idea about the debate raging across America. She hasn't even heard of Obama's push for health reform, nor the Republican efforts to prevent it. "I don't watch much television," she says.

There are 47 million voiceless people who have no access to the health care debate itself, let alone access to participate in it. They would be the biggest beneficiaries of reform, and yet they lack information about what is being attempted, and they certainly lack the wherewithal to do anything meaningful about it. At least this one news organization has offered a small voice to those suffering through the horrors of the lifestyle of the permanent underclass in America.

One thing though.

This story will never be read in an American newspaper. It comes from The UK Guardian.

Hey, at least the Brits are getting the full range of debate...

Lies Of Steele

Michael Steele doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to health care. This is an uncontroversial statement. He's still talking about death panels and rationing, and he's still vowing to keep government hands off of seniors' Medicare. He's talking about the $500 billion that can be excised from Medicare and Medicaid payments, through reducing lobbyist-driven overpayments to things like Medicare Advantage that do nothing to improve treatment, as if those are direct reductions of Medicare outcomes for patients.

They are lies. And Steele's column is a collection of outright lies. But considering that this is no penalty for lying, you can hardly blame Steele for getting away with as much as possible.

Howard Kurtz moans that the "death panels" wouldn't die in spite of journalistsic efforts to debunk the ridiculous notion, writing that "even when they report the facts, [journalists] have had trouble influencing public opinion" and calling the experience "a stunning illustration of the traditional media's impotence." Let me identify a problem that has helped create this impotence: a lack of follow-through.

Having identified Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Chuck Grassley, John McCain and, today, Michael Steele, as spreading falsehoods about health care reform even after they have been broadly discredited, will the journalists Kurtz mentions offer them any sanction? Or will these public figures continue to be extensively quoted in newspapers and on television?

We saw another one this week, as Fox News decided to bring us the new scare tactic, "death books." But media like those Kurtz cover have two choices in this respect. They can ignore the lie, and let it confine itself to Fox News, Drudge, the right-wing blogosphere and talk radio, which is arguably larger than the traditional media's reach. Or they can report on the lie, debunk it, and hope their debunk trumps the initial lie. Now, I don't really respect how media covers the lies, by hyping them endlessly and getting around to the debunks a few days later. But Kevin Drum is on to something here.

It's true: crankery used to go largely unreported. But that's not much of an option these days — or at least, the media doesn't treat it as an option. And the reason is obvious: crankery isn't limited to beady-eyed obsessives with mimeograph machines in their basements anymore. It's beamed out in practically raw form to an enormous audience by Drudge, talk radio, Fox News, and the blog/Twitter/Facebook channel. Once that's happened, mainstream outlets don't feel like it's ignorable.

Plus there's the fact that although news pages (and perhaps the straight news reports from TV anchors) may have mostly debunked the death panel story, op-ed pages and chat shows retailed it with vigor. What's more, even in the news pages most of the debunkings came days or even weeks after the crankery had already reached a fever pitch.

What do do? Fighting back is the obvious answer, but that's a two-edged sword since it also gives the crankery an even higher profile. Ditto for faster reaction from the news desks.

I dunno. We now live in an era of mass-market crankery ("saturation bullshitting," in g.powell's memorable phrase), and that's that. Either some bright cognitive researcher needs to figure out how to actually fight crankery, or else the rest of us have to figure out how to get things done even in the face of a permanent lunatic fringe. All legal ideas welcome.

I believe that progressives and Democrats could go on the offensive a bit more, and make Republicans defend their own positions rather than allowing them the space to concoct false memes about the opposition. But with Washington still wired for conservatism, and Drudge still the traditional media assignment editor, there's not a lot to do here. You will always have that push and pull between giving lies legitimacy and letting them fester unanswered.

I do agree with Matt Yglesias' assessment of Steele's op-ed, particularly its appearance in the Washington Post. If the claims in an op-ed aren't factual, newspapers are not required to print them.

So congratulations to Fred Hiatt for landing such a buzzworthy piece of nonsense for his publication and I hope the right-wing enjoys the giant tax hikes we’ll be enacting down the road once they show the political world that any attempt to trim Medicare spending, no matter how modest, will be savaged by opportunists on the other side.

Yep. Seems to me like Steele and his counterparts are walking right into a trap here, even if it's not realized for decades.

...I liked Anthony Weiner's take: "I have never heard such a ringing defense of a single-payer program like Medicare than I heard from Michael Steele today."

On Ignorance

While the Democratic leadership is accusing the NBC/WSJ poll of stacking the deck against health care reform, and to an extent they're correct, it's clear that a mountain of misinformation is successfully reaching the public, at real harm to the cause of reform.

One of the reasons why it has become tougher is due to misperceptions about the president’s plans for reform.

Majorities in the poll believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants; would lead to a government takeover of the health system; and would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions — all claims that nonpartisan fact-checkers say are untrue about the legislation that has emerged so far from Congress.

Forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly.

This is also in the poll: When Americans are read "actual details of the Obama health care plan, a majority -- 53 percent -- say they are in favor of it."



I think the media needs to look itself in the mirror. I fully expect Fox News to misinform its viewers and tilt toward the status quo. When you have a major news network reaching millions sourcing their research on town hall meetings to conservative blogs, we have a serious problem. Further, the current balkanized media landscape allows the crazies to retreat to their ideological corners, where they feel comfortable yelling Heil Hitler to a Jew.

But this goes beyond Fox News, which even with its reach represents a sliver of the overall population. Steve Benen has this right.

That last one is especially jarring. If the poll is accurate, nearly half the country seriously believes government officials seek the authority to pull the plug on grandma. That's insane, and it points to a political discourse that's badly broken.

But more than anything, it creates an enormous incentive to lie, blatantly and repeatedly, to the public. There are no real penalties, and the number of Americans who'll believe nonsense skews the debate in the liars' direction.

Partisans who aggressively lie on major media don't get thrown off those networks. In fact, the lies are privileged, given more importance and prominence than the truth.

Look what this local paper did to GOP leader Roy Blunt. He was lying, they called him out on it, and forced him to stop the lie.

Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Springfield, knows a thing or two about health care. But some of what he knows just isn’t true.

“I’m 59,” Mr. Blunt said last week during a meeting with Post-Dispatch reporters and editors. “In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn’t get it replaced.”

We fact-checked that. At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year and two-thirds of those done in England were on patients age 65 or older. More than 1,200 in Canada were done on people older than 85.

In a subsequent conversation with the paper, Blunt claimed: “I’m glad you pointed that out to me. I won’t use that example any more.”

I don't know if that's the model. But surely the whole nation need not be ignorant. You have to combat something with something, and Democrats haven't totally done the job. At the same time, the media must live up to their own responsibilities. A fully ignorant nation wouldn't have elected Barack Obama President, given all the smears and lies. That same spirit can dominate again, but it takes some work.

...more on this in the context of NBC trying to pass the media misinformation machine off on Fox, when they do a lot of the same thing.

The Grassley Maneuver

So, here's how this went. Chuck Grassley, who has in his history shown absolutely no indication of being a moderate in the US Senate, by virtue of seniority and the bold leadership of Captain Ineffective Max Baucus, somehow has a position of prominence on health care reform. And most recently, he's used it to claim that the end-of-life counseling benefit in Medicare in the House bill would "pull the plug on Grandma," furthering the intent of the paranoids who want to block any reform. He blew this up so much in an already overheated debate that the Senate Finance Committee reportedly dropped that provision from their version of the bill. And after that was completed, after the Twitter fight with Arlen Specter and all the rest, Grassley decides to completely retract the statement.

The retraction was buried deep in this Washington Post article on Grassley’s role, with a spokesperson admitting Grassley doesn’t really believe what he said about “grandma”:

Grassley says he opposes that counseling as written in the House version of the bill, but a spokesman said the senator does not think the House provision would in fact give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die. The House bill allows patients to decide for themselves if they would like such counseling.

Let’s be clear: By clarifying that Grassley doesn’t think the House bill would “give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die,” his spokesperson completely repudiated his widely discussed claim. This goes much farther than Grassley did in a statement released Friday clarifying he’d never used the words “death panel” and was merely worried about “unintended consequences.”

So Grassley made a wild and unsubstantiated charge, got an untold number of people riled up about it, excised it from his bill, and then admitted the whole thing was a lie. But none of this matters now, considering the damage done, and the retraction won't even get much attention.

Welcome to the American political system.

...Also, the key negotiator on the Senate Finance Committee will vote no on a plan even if he gets everything he wants, as long as other Republicans don't go along with it.

Keep negotiating with crazy and see how that works out.