In an Aug. 20 appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” former New York Lt. Gov. (and health care legislation critic) Betsy McCaughey referred to our organization as “spot-check dot org,” claiming we failed to adequately read the House health care bill. McCaughey is the source of the false claim that the bill calls for mandatory counseling for seniors “to do what’s in society’s best interest … and cut your life short.”
As we said in our article “False Euthanasia Claims,”
Palin vs. Obama: Death Panels
Like many disagreements in the digital age, it all started with a post on Facebook. Last Friday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin posted a note to her Facebook page and introduced a new term to the health care debate:
Palin, Aug. 7: 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,
When Philosophy Meets Politics
We’ll wager that, unless you happen to be a practicing bioethicist, you’d never heard of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel six weeks ago. But now Emanuel, the director of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, finds himself labeled a "deadly doctor" by Betsy McCaughey in an opinion piece in the New York Post. And controversial conservative pundit Ann Coulter recently proclaimed that "Zeke Emanuel is on my death list."
We debunked McCaughey’s charges in an Ask FactCheck item we posted today.
Obama Wrong on AARP Endorsement
At his town hall event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, President Obama went too far in claiming the support of AARP:
Obama: We have the AARP on board because they know this is a good deal for our seniors. …
[A]nother myth that we’ve been hearing about is this notion that somehow we’re going to be cutting your Medicare benefits. We are not. AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare, okay?
But AARP,
Health Care Meets Shark Week!
Playing off Discovery Channel’s much-watched Shark Week, MoveOn.org Political Action launched a video likening health insurance companies to these predators of the sea.
[TET ]
Announcer: They are enormous and powerful. They prey on our weaknesses, trying to separate the healthy from the sick. Their strategy is to confuse and exhaust their victims. And they kill people each year by denying coverage while profiting billions. During shark week, let’s take on the real predators: health insurance companies.
There He Goes Again: Obama’s False $6,000 Claim
At a nationally televised "town hall meeting" in Portsmouth, N.H., today, President Obama repeated a claim about health care that we’ve disputed in the past.
Obama: So we want – if I’m a customer, if I’m a consumer and I know that I’m overpaying $6,000 for anything else, I would immediately want the best deal. But for some reason, in health care, we continue to put up with getting a bad deal. We’re paying $6,000 more than any other advanced country and we’re not healthier for it –
How to Not Prove a Point
The United Kingdom’s Department of Health may not have expected to face such harsh criticism during debate of overhauling the health care system here in the United States. As we’ve repeatedly said, neither President Obama nor the major health care bills in Congress call for replicating the U.K.’s government-run and government-provided system. But our neighbors across the pond would have to smile – or perhaps laugh out loud – at this claim, courtesy of the conservative Investor’s Business Daily:
IBD editorial,
Broken Record on Record-Breaking Profits
Last week we posted an item on President Obama’s recent claim that health insurance companies were logging record profits. Not true, we discovered, at least not for the largest publicly traded companies. Some of them weren’t even close.
Expect to keep hearing the assertion, however, in a series of seven cookie-cutter radio ads the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is airing around the country this month, targeting Republican House members. Here’s one of them:
In each ad,
Nazi Symbols at Town Halls: The Real Story
Recent comments by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that swastikas and other Nazi imagery had been appearing at lawmakers’ town hall meetings on health care set off furious rounds of tweeting and blogging by outraged conservatives.
The episode began when the California Democrat was asked by a reporter whether she thought there was "legitimate grassroots opposition" at the meetings to congressional health care overhaul plans. She replied:
Pelosi: I think they are Astroturf. You be the judge …
Dying on a Wait List?
Perhaps the most emotional of the health care ads we’ve seen in recent months is the one featuring Canadian Shona Holmes, who warns of the dangers of a government-run health care system. Holmes tells viewers: "I survived a brain tumor. But if I’d relied on my government, I’d be dead. … As my brain tumor got worse, my government health care system told me I had to wait six months to see a specialist. In six months,