Betsy McCaughey

Dissecting the Health Care Attack

As I mentioned yesterday, the frenzy we’ve seen from the right (specifically Rush Limbaugh and Betsy McCaughey) over health care in the economic recovery package is the opening salvo in the larger battle against health care reform:

This is mostly a long game. In the short term, the right hopes to provide political cover, so Republicans and moderates can use these measures as excuses to vote against final passage of the bill. In the long term, though, this is laying the groundwork for the larger health care fight.

It’s a classic conservative play: Take a little issue, blow it out of proportion, claim it’s “government socializing health care,” and use fear to prevent progress. And it allows the big business lobbyists and the ideological conservatives to find good common cause.

So, let’s see if we can’t learn some lessons and tease out where conservatives might be heading in the future.

Media Matters has a great rundown on how exactly this attack played out in the media, documenting how this lie went straight from Betsy McCaughey’s article in Bloomberg to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show to “fair and balanced” anchors on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal, and back again:

The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore and Fox News anchors Bill Hemmer and Megyn Kelly promoted the falsehood — which first appeared in a Bloomberg “commentary” by Betsy McCaughey and was subsequently promoted by Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge — that the economic recovery bill includes a provision that would, in Moore’s words, “hav[e] the government essentially dictate treatments.” Limbaugh later took credit for spreading this story.

This is how the echo chamber works, and this is the mechanism that the right will use to spread misinformation on health care in the future.

How do we fight back against the smears? First, by discrediting the smearers.

As James Fallows (writing on Marc Ambinder’s blog at The Atlantic) thoroughly documents, Elizabeth “Betsy” McCaughey shouldn’t be listened to…ever:

At various stages in her career she has been a banker, a Republican politician, and a staffer at conservative think tanks, but she entered the public stage in the mid-1990s in the guise of a dispassionate, independent researcher who considered it her duty to inform the public about the dire threats they faced. Come to think of it, that is more or less the guise Cheney took in warning about the threat from Iraq.

In McCaughey’s case, the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction was the original Clinton Health Reform plan. In 1994 she wrote a cover story in the New Republic “revealing” a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn’t pass.

…

Seriously, every one of McCaughey’s statements about public policy from this day forward should be subjected to the “Oh yes, and how did it turn out last time?” test. We are in OJ territory here. Stop this new claim before it gets real traction.

So, the education and research that Media Matters does is critical, and it’s up to people like you and me to spread this information far and wide so people understand when this stuff shows up on their TV that it’s false.

Next, we have to reassure people with information. As Media Matters documents, the smear McCaughey was pushing - that measures in the economic recovery package would impose government control and rationing on health care - were false. But we can go a step farther than just pointing out falsehoods; we can attack the entire premise of the argument.

Conventional wisdom in Washington says that if you tell the public the government is going to ration their care (whether that claim is true or not), they turn solidly against health care reform. Therefore, when these attacks start coming, you have to scale back your ambitions. Turns out, this just isn’t true.

In a Lake Research message testing poll developed with Health Care for America Now, we tested whether people are swayed by just such an attack. We tested these two statements against each other:

Which statement comes closer to your own view?

A public health insurance plan will force people into lower quality care including long waiting times and rationing of care.

A public health insurance plan will provide people the choice of an affordable plan that includes a standard, comprehensive package of benefits, including a wide choice of doctors.

An overwhelming 66% of respondents (MOE +/-3.5%) agreed with the second statement, 51% strongly.

And this stands to reason. There is definitely one-third of this country that will never agree with us on health care reform. They are largely the same people who supported George W. Bush to the bitter end. We can never win these people to our side, we don’t need them to pass legislation, and we shouldn’t water down our principles to try and gain their support.

We need to make this case to Congress, the President, and other opinion leaders. We need them to know the data so they won’t get scared when the phone calls start coming in. Rush Limbaugh can dig up a ton of phone calls into Congress on short notice over somewhat obscure issues, as he did this week. We need to teach Congress that they can safely ignore calls coming in from Limbaugh fanatics - they don’t represent the way America actually thinks.

And lastly, we need to fight back. It’s obvious to just about anybody that we ration care already here in America - we just ration it differently. The rich, who can afford skyrocketing premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, get all the health care they want. And the middle class (not to mention the poor) have to put most of their income towards health care. And when these people get sick and need treatment, they have to battle armies of private insurance agents intent on rationing their care and protecting the insurance industry’s profit margins.

This argument needs to be made by us in the grassroots, by people on TV and in the print media, and by Members of Congress.

This all starts at the grassroots. Right now, Health Care for America Now is running a call-in campaign to Congress pushing back on the McCaughey and Limbaugh lies. Give your members of Congress a call and educate them on how you feel.

Going forward, it’s unclear exactly the direction the right will go in their attacks, but I have a feeling this notion of government rationing care will play a large role. So let’s keep this episode in mind next time the attacks start coming.

(also posted at the NOW! blog)