board77

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Apparently planning for death is considered a bad thing, which is just odd to me since we are supposed to be a Christian nation.

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Sure. So right now, don't cover me for pancreatic cancer cuz I don't have it. And I don't have a bad heart right now, so don't cover me for a heart attack. I'm a good driver, so I don't need insurance for treatment if I get in a car accident. Etc.

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I think the new Republican talking points you'll start seeing will be the rubbishing of the UK's National Health Service. The Stephen Hawking idiocy is probably one of the first signs. I suspect the Internet has allowed Americans to start learning that it works well and they have to neutralise that threat with new lies. Watch out for the campaign.

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Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

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Wendell Potter, a former CIGNA vice president, detailed what he said were past covert efforts by the industry. Though he said he does not have specifics for what is occurring now, because he's been out of the business for a year, it follows the same pattern.

"The industry is up to the same dirty tricks this year," Potter said at a Capitol news conference after meeting with House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), an avid supporter of the Democrats' plans for a healthcare overhaul.

"When you hear someone complaining about traveling down a 'slippery slope to socialism,' some insurance flack, like I used to be, wrote that," Potter added.

Potter said during his 20 years in the insurance business, the industry would funnel money to large public firms who would create front groups and find friendly voices in conservative media.

In particular, he cited front groups created to fight "Patients' Bill of Rights" legislation in the 1990s, as well as a campaign to discredit the Michael Moore film "Sicko," which harshly criticized the industry.

Slaughter joined in the attack, saying "the notion that this is going to be something devilish comes from the people who would lose money on it."

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If 1963 were 2009, the woman who assaulted Adlai Stevenson would be getting time on cable news to explain herself. That, not the paranoia itself, makes our present moment uniquely disturbing.

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lin’s ‘Death Panels’ on Life Support Due to Lies: Ann Woolner

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- On the chance I might suffer Terri Schiavo’s horrific fate, suspended between life and death as family members battled, I went to a lawyer.

I signed a document that says what treatment, if any, I would want under similar circumstances. It names the person and two backups who would speak for me in case I couldn’t. Grateful for advice on how to get what I want even when incapacitated, I wish the same for all those who want that peace of mind for themselves and their families. They could get the help, but for the partisan lies told by demagoguing politicians who swift-boated an innocuous provision in House health-care reform legislation. Thanks to them, a once bipartisan idea aimed at sparing families their very own Schiavo drama came to be labeled as government-sponsored euthanasia, even Nazism.

It’s only one provision, a mere six pages in the 1,018-page House bill. But the politically motivated whoppers that have all but killed the proposed consultations make the spreaders of these falsehoods unworthy of belief in anything associated with the bill. Not that we should take the word of any politician in this debate. President Barack Obama’s claims about the plan’s cost and how it would be paid for deserve serious fact-checking. But for pure demagoguery, Sarah Palin gets the prize for most outrageous. And smelling blood, stalwarts of the Republican Party jumped in. They infected the debate with a fever of fear that spread quickly among the vulnerable, the gullible and those already angry or suspicious.

Various Versions

The lie got told and re-told in various versions by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Republican National Chairman Michael Steele, House Republican leader John Boehner and Senator Charles Grassley, among others. To be clear, the consultation idea would force not a single patient to go for end-of-life counseling. (Frankly, I wish someone would force some of my procrastinating loved ones to prepare for the worst.) It merely says that if a Medicare recipient WANTS such a consultation with a health provider once every five years, Medicare will pay for it. Those gravely ill could go more often. So much for former New York Republican Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey’s claim that the bill would “absolutely require” the consultations. Only Medicare patients who want them would get them. Don’t believe me. It’s in the bill itself, beginning on page 424.

Advance Directives

It specifies that a physician would be the consultant and would go beyond explaining the advance directives and power of attorney documents I signed at my lawyer’s office. The doctor would also explain the range of end-of-life services and support, from life-sustaining treatments to hospice care.

What could be wrong with that?

It “may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia,” Boehner said last month. It could pressure older folks to sign advance directives, he said. Oh, please. Palin put it this way:

“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.”

Dishonest Interpretation

That isn’t Obama’s America, or the America the bill describes. But that didn’t keep Republicans from defending Palin’s dishonest interpretation of the bill.

Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia, the Republican who proposed end-of-life consultation for the Senate bill, at first said Palin’s rendition of it is “nuts.” The whole point of the consultation is “putting the authority in the individual rather than the government,” Isakson told the Washington Post on Aug. 10 in a fit of honesty. But when the political wind blew, Isakson whipped around and defended Palin. He came up with the lame excuse that the House version has more details on the consultations than he wanted, inviting more government intrusion. Likewise, Steele said Palin’s version was just fine. Her take is “within the context of what people are seeing in some of the legislation that is floating around there.”

Hemming and Hawing

When ABC’S George Stephanopoulos pointed out to Gingrich in a televised interview that nothing in the House bill would encourage euthanasia, Gingrich hemmed and hawed. “You’re asking us to trust turning power over to the government when there clearly are people in America who believe in establishing euthanasia,” he finally concluded. He didn’t name any of those people.

Once you talk about government-forced euthanasia of old folks, it’s a short step to Nazism. If elected officials are unwilling to make that leap, the extremists who spread fear on the airwaves aren’t. No wonder some protesters have shown up at town-hall meetings bearing signs and symbols likening Obama’s plan to Hitler’s regime. This is a shameful insult not only to Obama but to Holocaust victims and their families. So Grassley, another Palin defender and a key negotiator on the Senate bill, said the end-of-life provision is dead.

The Big Lie beat it to death.

What’s next?

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

ToshoftheWuffingas wrote:

But oh boy that meme is being repeated. I started to contribute to a Facebook discussion on healthcare not initially realising it was a set up for the drugs industry. You hear all this and worse. I'm plugging away at it for a little while because it may be the first time many of them have heard from someone with real experience of universal health care. The lies are coming thick and fast though.