No, Rep Paul Ryan’s Budget Proposal Is Not Brave
Prominent opinion writers have spent the last few days fawning over Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would essentially abolish Medicare and Medicaid while lowering taxes on top earners, and many of them have deployed a litany of superlatives usually reserved for costumed superheroes. Commentators like David Brooks and Jacob Weisberg have described Ryan’s plan as “brave,” and “bold,” and the word “courageous” has been ubiquitous.
But the closer people look at Ryan’s plan, the clearer it becomes that the plan isn’t all that brave. Let’s take stock of all the recent revelations about it.
Ryan’s plan included a laughably implausible unemployment analysis from Heritage predicting it would bring unemployment down to 4 percent by 2015 and 2.8 percent by 2012 — an analysis Heritage then quitely retracted by attempting to disappear it from the internet. Ryan’s plan claims to save money while repealing the Affordable Care Act, even though the CBO has said repealing the ACA will increase the deficit. Ryan implied that his plan was supported by President Bill Clinton’s former OMB Director Alice Rivlin, even though it isn’t. It cuts taxes on top earners, when the easiest way to reduce the deficit is to let the Bush tax cuts expire.
Ryan’s misleading claims aren’t the only thing that isn’t particularly brave about his plan. After accusing Democrats of “raiding” Medicare with the Affordable Care Act, Ryan spares the elderly voters who supported Republicans in 2010 by making sure only he guts medical care for future seniors (he still calls it “saving Medicare,” however). And as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted, 2.9 trillion in Ryan’s budget comes from cuts in programs focused on low-income Americans. It doesn’t touch defense spending.
In other words, it focuses on cuts to programs that benefit those most likely to vote Democratic, while preserving programs that serve those more likely to vote Republican.Rewarding your constituencies while punishing the other side’s is how partisan politics usually works, but there’s nothing particularly brave about it.
Ryan himself said during the rollout that his plan isn’t so much a budget as a “cause.” As Steve Benen wrote yesterday, the cause here is destroying the modern welfare state so that rich people have to pay less in taxes. The only reason so many people think Ryan’s plan is “brave” is because they agree with this cause.
When we call a person brave, what we usually mean is that his or her “bravery” is being employed towards an end we agree with. In this case, those who are hailing Ryan’s proposal as brave are doing so because they agree with its goal, which — no matter how many times people insist otherwise — is not deficit reduction. It’s destroying the social safety net. It just so happens that’s a cause a lot of wealthy people with a disproportionate influence on our political discourse happen to believe in. So they think it’s brave, even if the numbers are phony and even if it disproportionately punishes the poor. But there’s nothing at all brave about it.
By: Adam Serwer, The Washington Post, April 7, 2011
Put-up-Or-Shut-up Time For Republicans On Health-Care Reform
It’s put-up-or-shut-up time for Republicans. They managed to make it through the health-care debate without offering serious solutions of their own, and — perhaps more impressive — through the election by promising to tell us their solutions after they’d won. But the jig is up. They need a health-care plan — and quickly.
The GOP knew this day would come. In May 2009, Republican message-maestro Frank Luntz released a polling memo warning that “if the dynamic becomes ‘President Obama is on the side of reform and Republicans are against it,’ then the battle is lost.” Repeal, Luntz argued, wouldn’t be good enough. It would have to be “repeal and replace.” And so it was.
That, however, is easier said than done.
To understand the trouble the Republicans find themselves in, you need to understand the party’s history with health-care reform. For much of the 20th century, Democrats fought for a single-payer system, and Republicans countered with calls for an employer-based system. In February 1974, President Richard Nixon made it official. “Comprehensive health insurance is an idea whose time has come in America,” he said, announcing a plan in which “every employer would be required to offer all full-time employees the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan.”
In a moment of historically bad judgment — Ted Kennedy later called it his greatest political regret — Democrats turned him down. They thought they could still get single payer. They were wrong.
By the 1990s, they had learned from their mistake. Bill Clinton took office and, after a wrenching year of negotiations, announced legislation similar to Nixon’s.
”Under this health-care security plan,” Clinton said, “every employer and every individual will be asked to contribute something to health care.”
But Republicans again balked, calling instead for a system of “individual responsibility.” Senate Republicans quickly offered two bills — the horribly named Health Equity and Access Reform Act and the Consumer Choice Health Security Act — based on the idea that every person who has the means to buy health insurance should have to do so. We now call that concept “the individual mandate.”
Both bills attracted 20 or more co-sponsors. Neither passed, as Republicans yanked their compromise legislation the moment Democrats became desperate enough to consider it. The individual mandate, however, didn’t go away. It kicked around conservative health-care policy circles, racking up endorsements from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the libertarian magazine Reason. A year later, the mandate showed up in a law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in Massachusetts. And then it was in the bipartisan proposal that Utah Republican Bob Bennett and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden introduced in the Senate. And next, it was the centerpiece of the Democrats’ health-care reform push. Consensus, it seemed, was at hand.
Or not. Republicans turned on the individual mandate again. Senators who’d had their names on a bill that included an individual mandate — Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, Mike Crapo, Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, Olympia Snowe and Kit Bond, to name a few — voted to object, calling the policy “unconstitutional.” Romney had to explain away his signature accomplishment as governor of Massachusetts. And Republicans found themselves without a fallback.
The party’s current mood on health-care policy is perhaps best expressed by the efforts that Michael Cannon, an influential health-care wonk at the libertarian Cato Institute, has made to enlist members in his “anti-universal coverage club.”
Enter Wyden-Brown, an Affordable Care Act amendment that the White House has made a big show of endorsing: It says that any state that can produce a credible plan to cover as many people, with as comprehensive insurance, at as low a cost as the Affordable Care Act can wriggle out of all the law’s mandates but still receive all the law’s money. Vermont’s governor, for one, is stoked: He wants to try a single-payer proposal.
Most conservatives have been actively hostile. They make some fair technical points. The law envisions the secretary of Health and Human Services handing out the waivers, while the Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler would prefer to see a bipartisan commission in charge. But most take aim at the proposal’s basic goals: that care has to be as universal, as good and as cheap.
Cannon, for instance, frets that there’s no conservative policy that “would cover as many people as a law that forces them to buy coverage under penalty of law.” Butler worries that it “locks the states into guaranteeing a generous and costly level of benefits.”
But as the New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn points out, under the Affordable Care Act, a family of four could shell out $12,500 out of pocket for medical costs. How much stingier should the insurance be?
And Cannon is right that conservatives don’t have solutions to provide coverage as universal as what the Affordable Care Act would. But whose fault is that?
Conservatives once offered solutions competitive with what the Democrats were proposing, but over the past 30 years, they’ve abandoned each and every one of them to stymie Democratic presidents. Confronted with a challenge to provide broader access to better health care at a lower cost, they’re reduced to complaining that those aren’t the right goals for health-care reform. But we’ve yet to see how “less comprehensive insurance for fewer people” would play in Peoria. My hunch is it wouldn’t play very well.
For decades, Republicans have chosen stopping Democratic presidents over reforming the American health-care system. Now that reform has passed, the solution for members of the GOP is to press the rewind button. They’re about to find out that it’s not enough.
On that much, Luntz and I agree: If the public comes to see the GOP as opposed to reform, “the battle is lost” — at least if you believe “the battle” is to beat the Democrats rather than provide quality health insurance to every American.
By: Ezra Klein, Columnist, The Washington Post, March 8, 2011
Republicans Say Everything the Dems Pass Is Unconstitutional — Even Policies They’ve Championed for Decades
That Republicans are relentlessly attacking the constitutionality of what had long been one of their signature ideas for reforming the health-care system — the individual mandate requiring people to buy insurance or pay a penalty – is a testament to just how far down the rabbit-hole our discourse has gone.
Late last year, when a federal judge ruled against the mandate (two other courts disagreed, and the Supreme Court will end up deciding the question), Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, rejoiced. “Today is a great day for liberty,” he said. “Congress must obey the Constitution rather than make it up as we go along.” It was an odd testament to freedom, given that Hatch himself co-sponsored a health-care reform bill built around an individual mandate in the late 1990s.
Journalist Steve Benen noted that while “the record here may be inconvenient for the right … it’s also unambiguous: the mandate Republicans currently hate was their idea.”
It was championed by the Heritage Foundation… Nixon embraced it in the 1970s, and George H.W. Bush kept it going in the 1980s. For years, it was touted by the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, Scott Brown, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Judd Gregg, and many other … notable GOP officials.
According to NPR, the mandate was the Right’s response to progressive proposals to establish a single-payer system. Mark Pauly, the conservative economist widely credited with the idea, explained that “a group of economists and health policy people, market-oriented, sat down and said, ‘Let’s see if we can come up with a health reform proposal that would preserve a role for markets but would also achieve universal coverage.'”
That was then, this is now. Since it was a Democratic Congress that enacted the mandate, this conservative idea for creating a business-friendly model of universal health care has become something profoundly un-American, according to many of those very same Republicans who championed it. (Asked about the GOP’s retreat from the individual mandate it had long promoted, Pauly said, “That’s not something that makes me particularly happy.”)
And as is generally the case in these heady days of Tea Party conservatism, it’s not just that the individual mandate is bad – it’s also “un-Constitutional” (just like child labor laws, federal disaster assistance, food safety standards, etc.). As Gary Epps, a legal scholar at the University of Baltimore, put it, “Conservative lawmakers increasingly claim that the ‘original intent’ of the Constitution’s framers and the views of the right wing of the Republican Party are one and the same.”
A brief filed in support of Virginia’s challenge to the Affordable Care Act by the Landmark Legal Foundation – headed by noted wing-nut radio host Mark Levin, who believes that the Tea Partiers have been “tormented and abused far more than the colonists were by the King of England” – laid out the argument, calling the erstwhile Republican approach to universal health care “evidence of congressional power run amok.”
Congress can tax interstate commerce, it can regulate interstate commerce, it can even prohibit certain types of interstate commerce, but it cannot compel an individual to enter into a legally binding private contract against the individual’s will and interests. There is nothing in the history of this nation, let alone the history of the Constitution … that endorses such a radical departure from precedent, law, and logic.
Like most of the Right’s views of the Constitution – and the Founders’ intent – this is entirely wrong; it’s historical revisionism driven by ideology.
In 1792, none other than George Washington signed the Uniform Militia Act, a law requiring every white male citizen to purchase a whole basket of items – “a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein” – from private companies. Bradley Latino at Seton Hall law school’s Health Reform Watch added that “this was no small thing.”
Although anywhere from 40 to 79% of American households owned a firearm of some kind, the Militia Act specifically required a military-grade musket. That particular kind of gun was useful for traditional, line-up-and-shoot 18th-century warfare, but clumsy and inaccurate compared to the single-barrel shotguns and rifles Americans were using to hunt game. A new musket, alone, could cost anywhere from $250 to $500 in today’s money. Some congressmen estimated it would cost £20 to completely outfit a man for militia service — about $2,000 today.
Some on the Right have argued that this history is irrelevant as the law was passed under the auspices of the Constitution’s militia clauses, not the Commerce Clause. That’s true, but doesn’t change the fact that it disproves the claim that Congress has never compelled citizens to purchase goods or services from private firms – that’s patently false, regardless of how the measures differed in their details.
And despite the fact that there were a number of legislators serving in that Congress who had signed the Constitution five years earlier, “not one of militia reform’s many opponents thought to argue the mandate was a government taking of property for public use. Nor did anyone argue it to be contrary to States’ rights under the Tenth Amendment.” Those who opposed the bill simply argued that it would put too great a burden on the poor.
Of course, mandating that citizens buy a gun is different than requiring them to purchase health insurance. But as Rick Ungar, an attorney and writer, pointed out, Congress did in fact pass a mandate requiring health insurance…back in 1798.
The Act for Sick and Disabled Seamen created a government-operated hospital system – socialized medicine! – and mandated that all privately employed sailors purchase health insurance in order to sail.
It’s not an exact parallel. Nobody was forced to become a merchant seaman. But as Ungar noted, “this is no different than what we are looking at today. Each of us has the option to turn down employment that would require us to purchase private health insurance under the health care reform law.”
The Act also required sea captains to withhold 1 percent of sailors’ earnings to finance the program rather then mandate that they purchase a policy themselves – it was the first payroll tax. But as Ezra Klein noted in the Washington Post, “if conservatives really do prefer a system of payroll taxes that purchase you public insurance to the private system envisioned in the Affordable Care Act, I’m sure there are a lot of liberals who would vote for a bill that repealed the Affordable Care Act and replaced it with Medicare-for-all.”
It’s an important point – the liberal approach to universal health care is not only simpler and far more cost-effective, but unlike the Right’s individual mandate, it also falls unambiguously within the federal government’s enumerated powers.
Health care is also, in the words of the Congressional Research Service, “a unique market” in that one cannot opt out of it even if one wishes to do so. That’s because, by law, we don’t allow people to simply die in the streets, untreated. The uninsured without the means to pay nonetheless get (very costly) care in emergency rooms, and the rest of us pick up the tab.
And here, again, it’s worth noting that “the 5th Congress did not really need to struggle over the intentions of the drafters of the Constitutions in creating this Act as many of its members were the drafters of the Constitution.” The bill was signed into law by none other than John Adams, considered to be among the most influential of the “Founding Fathers.” Thomas Jefferson was the president of the Senate at the time, and Jonathan Dayton, the youngest man to sign the Constitution, served as Speaker of the House.
As the current legislation stands, even the American Enterprise Institute concedes that “the majority of constitutional experts are betting that the courts will uphold the mandate” – although they’re not happy about it. And that’s because the other Constitutional arguments against the reforms are just as dubious. Conservatives have come to use the Constitution as a crutch, avoiding debates on the merits of various proposals by asserting, with a broad wave of the hand, that whatever the policy in question may be, it’s all illegitimate.
The constitutionality of the health-care mandate will ultimately be decided by an activist majority on the Supreme Court. Nobody can predict how it will rule, but the Constitution gives the Congress power to “to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises … and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States,” a power the Congressional Research Service characterizes as ”one of the broadest powers in the Constitution,” and one that forms “the basis of government health programs in the Social Security Act, including Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.”
The Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause as giving the government the authority to regulate not only interstate commercial transactions in a limited sense, but also “those activities having a substantial relation to interstate commerce.” (Our health-care system is the costliest in the world, and eats up about 18 percent of our economic output, so it’s hard to see how one can argue that it doesn’t have a “substantial relation” to our national economy.)
Then there’s the common conservative argument that the Commerce Clause only covers economic activity, but not inactivity – a claim that is also factually incorrect, but was nonetheless accepted by Henry Hudson, the federal judge who ruled against the government in the Virginia suit. But even if it were true, it’s hard to see the relevance of the argument given the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper clause, which authorizes the government to “make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.”
So, to recap: Congress is expressly authorized to raise taxes and spend public funds to further the “general welfare” of the nation; it can regulate any area that has a “substantial relation” to interstate commerce, and it can pass any law that is “necessary and proper” to further those enumerated powers.
On its face, there’s nothing in the Constitution constraining the government from enacting its health-care scheme. But the heart of conservative rhetoric these days is that any legislation passed by Democrats is illegitimate and defies the will of the Founders, as channeled by the mystics who lead the Tea Party movement.
That’s apparently the case even when those policies are among those they’ve championed for years based on their own ideological preferences.
By: Joshua Holland, Editor and Senior Writer, AlterNet-January 28, 2011
PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: ‘A government takeover of health care’
In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama’s ambitious plan to overhaul America’s health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a “government takeover.”
“Takeovers are like coups,” Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. “They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.”
The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the “public option” concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.
But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.
PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections.
Readers of PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times‘ independent fact-checking website, also chose it as the year’s most significant falsehood by an overwhelming margin. (Their second-place choice was Rep. Michele Bachmann’s claim that Obama was going to spend $200 million a day on a trip to India, a falsity that still sprouts.)
By selecting “government takeover’ as Lie of the Year, PolitiFact is not making a judgment on whether the health care law is good policy.
The phrase is simply not true.
Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “The label ‘government takeover” has no basis in reality, but instead reflects a political dynamic where conservatives label any increase in government authority in health care as a ‘takeover.’ ”
An inaccurate claim
“Government takeover” conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:
• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.
• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up “exchanges” where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don’t have it.
• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.
• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.
• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.
PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.
It’s true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers. But it is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market.
Republicans who maintain the Democratic plan is a government takeover say that characterization is justified because the plan increases federal regulation and will require Americans to buy health insurance.
But while those provisions are real, the majority of Americans will continue to get coverage from private insurers. And it will bring new business for the insurance industry: People who don”t currently have coverage will get it, for the most part, from private insurance companies.
Consider some analogies about strict government regulation. The Federal Aviation Administration imposes detailed rules on airlines. State laws require drivers to have car insurance. Regulators tell electric utilities what they can charge. Yet that heavy regulation is not described as a government takeover.
This year, PolitiFact analyzed five claims of a “government takeover of health care.” Three were rated Pants on Fire, two were rated False.
‘Can’t do it in four words’
Other news organizations have also said the claim is false.
Slate said “the proposed health care reform does not take over the system in any sense.’ In a New York Times economics blog, Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt, an expert in health care economics, said, “Yes, there would be a substantial government-mandated reorganization of this relatively small corner of the private health insurance market (that serves people who have been buying individual policies). But that hardly constitutes a government takeover of American health care.”
FactCheck.org, an independent fact-checking group run by the University of Pennsylvania, has debunked it several times, calling it one of the “whoppers” about health care and saying the reform plan is neither “government-run” nor a “government takeover.”
We asked incoming House Speaker John Boehner’s office why Republican leaders repeat the phrase when it has repeatedly been shown to be incorrect. Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, replied, “We believe that the job-killing ObamaCare law will result in a government takeover of health care. That’s why we have pledged to repeal it, and replace it with common-sense reforms that actually lower costs.”
Analysts say health care reform is such a complicated topic that it often cannot be summarized in snappy talking points.
“If you’re going to tell the truth about something as complicated as health care and health care reform, you probably need at least four sentences,” said Maggie Mahar, author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. “You can”t do it in four words.”
Mahar said the GOP simplification distorted the truth about the plan. “Doctors will not be working for the government. Hospitals will not be owned by the government,” she said. “That’s what a government takeover of health care would mean, and that’s not at all what we”re doing.”
How the line was used
If you followed the health care debate or the midterm election – even casually – it’s likely you heard “government takeover” many times.
PolitiFact sought to count how often the phrase was used in 2010 but found an accurate tally was unfeasible because it had been repeated so frequently in so many places. It was used hundreds of times during the debate over the bill and then revived during the fall campaign. A few numbers:
• The phrase appears more than 90 times on Boehner’s website, GOPLeader.gov.
• It was mentioned eight times in the 48-page Republican campaign platform “A Pledge to America” as part of their plan to “repeal and replace the government takeover of health care.”
• The Republican National Committee’s website mentions a government takeover of health care more than 200 times.
Conservative groups and tea party organizations joined the chorus. It was used by FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
The phrase proliferated in the media even after Democrats dropped the public option. In 2010 alone, “government takeover” was mentioned 28 times in the Washington Post, 77 times in Politico and 79 times on CNN. A review of TV transcripts showed “government takeover” was primarily used as a catchy sound bite, not for discussions of policy details.
In most transcripts we examined, Republican leaders used the phrase without being challenged by interviewers. For example, during Boehner’s Jan. 31 appearance on Meet the Press, Boehner said it five times. But not once was he challenged about it.
In rare cases when the point was questioned, the GOP leader would recite various regulations found in the bill and insist that they constituted a takeover. But such followups were rare.
An effective phrase
Politicians and officials in the health care industry have been warning about a “government takeover” for decades.
The phrase became widely used in the early 1990s when President Bill Clinton was trying to pass health care legislation. Then, as today, Democrats tried to debunk the popular Republican refrain.
When Obama proposed his health plan in the spring of 2009, Luntz, a Republican strategist famous for his research on effective phrases, met with focus groups to determine which messages would work best for the Republicans. He did not respond to calls and e-mails from PolitiFact asking him to discuss the phrase.
The 28-page memo he wrote after those sessions, “The Language of Healthcare 2009,” provides a rare glimpse into the art of finding words and phrases that strike a responsive chord with voters.
The memo begins with “The 10 Rules for Stopping the ‘Washington Takeover’ of Healthcare.” Rule No. 4 says people “are deathly afraid that a government takeover will lower their quality of care – so they are extremely receptive to the anti-Washington approach. It’s not an economic issue. It’s a bureaucratic issue.”
The memo is about salesmanship, not substance. It doesn’t address whether the lines are accurate. It just says they are effective and that Republicans should use them. Indeed, facing a Democratic plan that actually relied on the free market to try to bring down costs, Luntz recommended sidestepping that inconvenient fact:
“The arguments against the Democrats’ healthcare plan must center around politicians, bureaucrats and Washington … not the free market, tax incentives or competition.”
Democrats tried to combat the barrage of charges about a government takeover. The White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly put out statements, but they were drowned out by a disciplined GOP that used the phrase over and over.
Democrats could never agree on their own phrases and were all over the map in their responses, said Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee.
“It was uncoordinated. Everyone had their own idea,” Dean said in an interview with PolitiFact.
“The Democrats are atrocious at messaging,” he said. “They’ve gotten worse since I left, not better. It’s just appalling. First of all, you don”t play defense when you”re doing messaging, you play offense. The Republicans have learned this well.”
Dean grudgingly admires the Republican wordsmith. “Frank Luntz has it right, he just works for the wrong side. You give very simple catch phrases that encapsulate the philosophy of the bill.”
A responsive chord
By March of this year, when Obama signed the bill into law, 53 percent of respondents in a Bloomberg poll said they agreed that “the current proposal to overhaul health care amounts to a government takeover.”
Exit polls showed the economy was the top issue for voters in the November election, but analysts said the drumbeat about the “government takeover” during the campaign helped cement the advantage for the Republicans.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat whose provision for Medicare end-of-life care was distorted into the charge of “death panels” (last year’s Lie of the Year), said the Republicans’ success with the phrase was a matter of repetition.
“There was a uniformity of Republican messaging that was disconnected from facts,” Blumenauer said. “The sheer discipline . . . was breathtaking.”
By: Bill Adair, Angie Drobnic Holan, PolitiFact-December 16th, 2010
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