Yesterday in a “telephone town hall,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) not only repeated her opposition to Democratic proposals for health care reform, but characterized all federal government incursions into health care as unconstitutional. In fact, she said that attempting reform was nothing more than a “distraction” from more important issues:

FOXX: The Constitution doesn’t grant a right to health care, and most of us are living as much by the Constitution as we can. It also doesn’t give the federal government the authority to deal with health care. As you may know, the 10th amendment, it says if it isn’t mentioned in the Constitution to be done by the federal government, it’s left to the states or the people. [...]

I think one of the problems we have in this country right now is the fact that the federal government is trying to do too much. We need to leave things to the states and the localities. … And unfortunately, we are distracting ourselves from looking after the defense of this nation because we are dealing with issues that should, by right, be the state and individual’s.

Foxx, of course, also thinks the current health care system in America is so “good” that it couldn’t really get much better. “There are no Americans who don’t have healthcare,” Foxx said last month. “Everybody in this country has access to healthcare.” (She’s wrong.)

Foxx is right that the Constitution never explicitly says the words “health care.” But as Ian Millhiser has pointed out, Article I does give Congress the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises” and to “provide for….the general welfare of the United States.” “Rather than itemizing specific subject matters, such as health care, which Congress is allowed to spend money on,” notes Millhiser, “the framers chose instead to give Congress a broad mandate to spend money in ways that promote the ‘general welfare.’”

Of course, Foxx doesn’t seem to have a problem with Medicare. When Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) proposed an amendment to kill this government-run program, neither Foxx nor any other Republican voted for it.

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The Texas State Board of Education review committee is preparing to vote on a draft of proposed standards for history textbooks. Noting that the draft has “nothing about liberals,” the Houston Chronicle reported:

The first draft for proposed standards in United States History Studies Since Reconstruction says students should be expected “to identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority.” [...] Others have proposed adding talk show host Rush Limbaugh and the National Rifle Association.

The 15-member committee, stacked with 10 Republicans, is expected to vote along party lines. Earlier this year, a panel of right-wing “experts” produced a report urging the committee to remove biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen F. Austin, and César Chávez, and instead add history about the “motivational role the Bible and the Christian faith played in the settling of the original colonies.”

On The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart hosted notorious anti-health care reform provocateur Besty McCaughey, who played a prominent role in sinking President Clinton’s reform effort in 1994 and recently helped spawn the “death panel” myth. Stewart lambasted McCaughey for her “hyperbolic” and “dangerous” claims, but the former Republican lieutenant governor of New York refused to back down on any of her assertions.

When Stewart challenged her on her false claims about end-of-life counseling, McCaughey repeated her debunked argument that the counseling was essentially mandatory because it supposedly ties doctors’ “quality” rating to how many of their patients have living wills. Later, in the segment of the interview that was only posted online, McCaughey claimed that Americans have the best life expectancy in the world:

MCCAUGHEY: Let me say one thing that’s really important. Right now, if you’re seriously ill, the best place to be is in the United States. We are number one…

STEWART: If you have the resources.

MCCAUGHEY: No, we are number one.

STEWART: If you have the resources.

MCCAUGHEY: We are number one in cancer survival rates in 13 out 16 most common forms of cancer and that, those data reflect the experiences of all people, not just those with insurance. So, my view…

STEWART: We’re 50th in infant mortality and 46th in life expectancy.

MCCAUGHEY: Wait a second, life expectancy, when you remove violent crime and car accidents, we are number one.

Watch it:

McCaughey is referring to a commonly cited University of Iowa presentation. But she and others who cite it are ignoring the fact that there is another measure that is used to specifically examine a health care system’s impact on life and death — “amenable mortality.”

Amenable mortality measures “deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care,” such as treatable cancers, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. According to the Commonwealth Fund, the United States ranked last in comparison to 19 industrialized countries with a rate of 109.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2002–03. In the leading countries, mortality rates per 100,000 people were 64.8 in France, 71.2 in Japan, and 71.3 in Australia.

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