This morning, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and health care provocateur Betsy McCaughey took their health care debate to Dylan Ratigan’s ‘Morning Meeting.’ In a heated exchange that lasted almost 15 minutes, the two sparred over Medicare cuts, the public option, and health care spending. Weiner insisted that a robust public plan could restore competition to concentrated health care markets and reduce health care costs by an estimated $150 billion. McCaughey, the architect of the false “death panels” myth, continued her scare-mongering campaign against seniors: “The elephant in the room here is that all these bills are devastating care for seniors and the Baucus bill is the deadliest of all!”

Throughout the interview, McCaughey verbally attacked Ratigan and Weiner, complaining that she was being shut out of the debate. “Anthony, you are ignorant about health insurance,” she said, before insisting that “this will go down in history as one of the most browbeating interviews in television history.” “I hope that it does,” Ratigan replied. “And maybe you’ll learn at that point then to answer questions as opposed to go on television and cast accusations.” Watch a compilation:

After repeatedly refusing to explain how she would reduce health care spending, McCaughey proposed “inching up the eligibility age [for Medicare] one month a year until 2043 when the eligibility age reaches 70.” That could “put Medicare on a firm footing without cutting care for Medicare recipients.”

“That was a solid answer to your question,” Weiner exclaimed facetiously. “Take away 100% of Medicare for people 65 to 70.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, which McCaughey credited with the idea, eliminating “younger beneficiaries” from the Medicare program would do little to control costs. “Outlays for Medicare would [still] rise to 7.7 percent of GDP by 2050,” the CBO concluded.

Weiner pounced on McCaughey’s solution, which could cut as many as 11.3 million seniors from Medicare. “You want to gut Medicare,” Weiner told McCaughey. “That is exactly right. Now, I’m the one you’re accused of scaring seniors? You just said on this show you wanted to cut Medicare for everyone 65 to 70, isn’t that right?” “I will get it at 70 under the CBO proposal…and you will too.”

This morning, during an interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, health care provocateur Betsy McCaughey suggested that policy makers could slow Medicare spending without cutting $500 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over 10 years and “denying care to the elderly.”

Instead, the author of the “death panels” charge, suggested that policy makers should cut Americans aged 65 to 69 from the program:

The fact is that if Medicare inched up the eligibility age one month a year, until 2043 when it reached age 70, Medicare would be solvent. And that is what the Congress should do and that is what the Congressional Budget Office has urged Congress to do every year. That would solve the problem without telling elderly people that they have to suffer with crippling arthritis rather than get a knee replacement.

Listen:

Despite McCaughey’s claim, the Congressional Budget Office does not “urge” Congress to raise Medicare’s eligibility age “every year.” The CBO merely includes the policy as one of “115 options for reducing (or, in some cases, increasing) federal spending on health care, altering federal health care programs, and making substantive changes to the nation’s health insurance system.”

To put the debate in terms McCaughey can understand, page 51 (37 in print version) of “CBO’s Budget Options Volume 1” says that death paneling Americans 65 to 69 years old from the Medicare system would have little effect on the trajectory of Medicare’s long-term spending. First, the option would require Medicare to “inch up” the eligibility age by two month every year, not one. And, since “younger beneficiaries are healthier and thus less costly than the program’s average beneficiary,” “outlays for Medicare would [still] rise to 7.7 percent of GDP by 2050.”

What’s more, “increasing the age of eligibility for Medicare would shift costs that are now paid by that program to individuals and to employers that offered health insurance to their retirees. Those higher costs might lead more employers to reduce or eliminate such coverage.” Uninsured 65 to 69 year olds would enter the Medicare program in worse health, only increasing Medicare’s costs.

Health care provocateur Betsy McCaughey is pushing back against critics who claim that the end-of-life counseling provision in the House bill is “voluntary.” “Partisans for the legislation claim that it simply aims to provide Medicare coverage for once-every-five-year conversations with doctors over end of life care. Wrong,” she writes.

In fact, after initially claiming that “the Congress would make it mandatory, absolutely require, that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life,” McCaughey is now arguing that the bill does not directly mandate the sessions. Instead, the language would encourage doctors to perform consultations by basing a “doctor’s quality” and reimbursement levels on “the percentage of your doctor’s patients who create living wills and adhere to them.” “Doctors will incur penalties when families don’t adhere to end of life plans,” she argues:

Partisans for the legislation claim that it simply aims to provide Medicare coverage for once-every-five-year conversations with doctors over end of life care. Wrong. The new “benefit” is inserted in legislation with the express purpose of controlling health care costs (page 1). The bill lists what must be covered in the consultation (pages 425-30). Worse still, the legislation states that the Medicare system will rate your doctor’s “quality” and (and adjust reimbursement) based on the percentage of your doctor’s patients who create living wills and adhere to them.

McCaughey’s claim that the benefit’s express purpose is to “control costs” is an outright invention. Page 1 of the bill doesn’t even mention the provision. Moreover, if the bill pegged a physician’s reimbursement to the actions of the patient, then it could potentially be construed as coercive. But pg 432 of the House health bill allows the provider to offer a patient a comprehensive perspective of end-of-life counseling and adhere to certain quality standards. Nowhere does the language connect a physician’s “quality” or “reimbursement” with “the percentage of your doctor’s patients who create living wills and adhere to them.”

Ironically, the “quality standards” language that “patient advocate” McCaughey is perverting are intended to encourage doctors to provide patients with comprehensive information about end-of-life decisions and protect patients from incomplete or improper sessions.

It was only a matter of time until Betsy McCaughey read the latest health care legislation and discovered, as she did some 16 years ago, a government conspiracy to deny Americans access to quality health care.

McCaughey, who has long characterized herself as a “consumer advocate,” helped topple President Clinton’s reform effort by claiming that it “will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better…The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you,” she wrote. The false charge ricocheted across the media and helped drown Clinton’s efforts. It wasn’t until 1995 that James Fallows explained that McCaughey completely misinterpreted the Clinton legislation and ignored language protecting patient choice.

Sixteen-years later, McCaughey is still positioning herself as unbiased interpreter of legislative language. In a rash of recent media appearances, McCaughey has argued that “for people who are currently get their insurance from their employer because this [HELP] bill and the House bill both force employers to move their employees into low grade HMOs within five years.” Watch a compilation:

McCaughey, who claims to have read the 610 page HELP bill three times, cites passage 3101 of the HELP bill as proof of the supposed requirement. The section, which is titled AFFORDABLE HEALTH CHOICES FOR ALL AMERICANS outlines the choices of coverage. Lower income Americans could enroll in Medicaid and SCHIP, the currently uninsured could find affordable coverage from a menu of different plans offered through the health insurance exchange; Americans with employer-based coverage could continue in their current plans or, after a period of time, also buy coverage through the exchange (or ‘Gateway,’ as the HELP bill calls it).

Nothing in the section McCaughey cites — or the bill — requires employers to move their employees into HMO plans. To the contrary, the passage on employers stresses that employers will have the choice to enroll their employees in a plan through the exchange. Under section (g), PORTALS TO STATE GATEWAY, the bill states, “A qualified employer may select to provide support for coverage of employees under a qualified health plan at any tier of cost sharing described 2 in section 3111(a)(1).”

Reading and re-reading the bill may have caused McCaughey’s eyes to also glaze over page 55 of the HELP bill, which explicitly protects Americans’ right to choose their own coverage:

On June 26th, Today, Media Matters for America wrote an open letter to cable news networks pointing out that “as the debate over health care reform proceeds, it is crucial that discussions and reports on the subject are accurate and fair. If the networks insist on hosting Ms. McCaughey to discuss health care, they have an obligation to their viewers to challenge and debunk her falsehoods.” Read the full letter here.

Betsy McCaughey’s new editorial in the Wall Street Journal argues that the President’s recent Council of Economic Advisers report — which found that slowing health care spending by 1.5 percentage points (from 6 percent a year to 4.5 percent) would create “as many as 500,000 jobs a year” and increase “annual income for the average family of four by $2,600” — is simply “untrue”:

On Monday President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers released a report called “The Economic Case for Health Care Reform.” The report argues that Americans must curb their consumption of medical care in order to avoid soaring federal deficits, unsustainable burdens on family budgets, and damage to the economy. All of these claims are untrue.

McCaughey argues that efforts to lower health care spending would expose “the nation to medical scarcity,” resulting in “a European-like system where medical care is limited.” She deliberately confuses slowing the growth of health care spending with slashing existing spending. As a result, she’s able to claim that “you may be able to keep your health plan — as politicians have promised — but you’ll find a lower standard of care when you need it.”

But this argument isn’t about Americans not receiving care when they need it, it’s about improving our value of care. More services do not necessarily translate into better health care. In fact, they often produce worse outcomes. A recent Business Roundtable study found that compared to France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom, U.S. workers and employers receive 23 percent less value from our health care system than the citizens of these other nations.

We pay for volume and not value; quantity and not quality and McCaughey is trying to conflate the Democrats’ efforts to increase system efficiency with cuts in needed medical services. Simplifying medical forms or doing a better job managing chronic diseases (thus negating the need for more expansive treatments down the road), however, is not the same as denying treatment for a heart attack. In fact, every other major industry has long abandoned the use of paper records or performing numerous unnecessary or duplicated services.

McCaughey buries the distinction and attempts to diminish the severity of the health care crisis. Health care costs are not skyrocketing, families are not burdened by growing premiums, and “cutting annual increases in health-care spending by 1.5% a year” will endanger jobs, she argues. For most families, things are getting better, not worse. “Food and energy together have taken up a declining share of Americans’ spending each year since 1960… [allowing Americans] to spend more on health care.” Never mind the gap between wage and premium growth, the growing number of uninsured, or the increasing number of medically-related bankruptcies.

Since health care costs are increasing at a lower rate in 2007 than in 1980, they are of no concern to the nation’s financial stability. In fact, Medicare’s increasing spending can be fixed by “asking wealthy seniors to pay more or inching the eligibility age upward two months a year until it reaches age 70 in 2043″ — a proposal which, in reality, would save little money, since the young elderly are healthier than older and disabled Medicare beneficiaries.

After orchestrating and funding the so-called Tea Parties movement, Americans for Prosperity — a nationwide front group founded and funded by the right-wing polluter Koch Industries — is launching an ad campaign characterizing President Obama’s effort to reform the health care system as a government take-over that will ration care and care and deny treatments.

Americans for Prosperity is notorious for its fake grassroots efforts, funneling millions of dollars into conservative campaigns designed to undermine Democratic initiatives. As Lee Fang put it, “AFP is a professional AstroTurf machine”:

- Hosted ‘Drill Baby, Drill’ rallies around the country.

- Financed Joe the Plumber’s tour against the Employees’ Free Choice Act and other anti-EFCA rallies.

- Started NoStimulus.com, “a grassroots website that we hope will be a focal point for the widespread frustration ordinary Americans feel at the runaway government growth that we see during good economic times and bad.”

Now, operating under the name Patients United Now, Americans for Prosperity — which is mostly funded by large multinational corporations — is masquerading as an organic grassroots movement outraged over the Presidents health care proposals:

We are people just like you. We went to D.C. with questions about “reform”— because we all favor policies which keep insurance costs down and help those patients with pre-existing conditions get coverage. Buying “care insurance” should be like buying car insurance: flexible, transparent and simple. We support health care for the poor through Medicaid.

But what we found SHOCKED US: Radical solutions. Discussions behind closed doors. Patients like us NOT included, just big companies, lobbyists, unions and politicians.

For many in D.C. cutting costs means CUTTING CARE—-your care.

The effort provides cover or ‘grassroots clout’ for conservative politicians and activists to oppose the President’s health care initiative. But this collection of trumped-up charges, outright lies and complete fabrications makes little headway in critiquing the President’s actual proposal. Because just like all other peddlers of the “government take-over” critique — Frank Luntz, Conservatives for Patients Rights, Betsy McCaughey, and Sally Pipes — the goal is to define Obama’s proposal in their terms rather than to engage in a debate about health care or offer real solutions to the crisis. As Frank Luntz admitted to the New York Times, “we don’t know what he is proposing. We want to avoid ‘a Washington takeover.’”

A so-called “government-takeover” may be a personal ideological crusade for AFP — whose founders also established the conservative CATO organization — and its AstroTurf movement of corporate clients, but most Americans support greater government involvement in the health care system. A recent poll by Lake Research for Health Care For America Now shows that there is “intense and widespread support” for the choice of a public health insurance plan, with 73% of voters favoring a choice of a public or private plan, including large majorities of Democrats and independents (77% and 79%) but surprisingly, even a high plurality of Republicans (63%).

The cast of health care crisis deniers and stone throwers, whose constituency are only as large as their fund raising outreach efforts, are prominent not for their message, but for their coffers. Frank Luntz represents Blue Cross Blue Shield, CIGNA Dental Health and Pfizer. Conservatives for Patients Rights are funded by ‘undisclosed’ special interests and a $20 million personal investment from CEO Rick Scott, Betsy McCaughey sits on the board of a medical device company and Sally Pipes’ Pacific Research Institute receives money from Altria (formerly known as Philip Morris), Microsoft, Pfizer and ExxonMobil.

So if the question is, why do it? Why lie about the President’s efforts? Then the answer is a mix of ideological conservative zeal, political calculation — denying Democrats a victory on the issue — and businesses interest. Ultimately, these groups are expressing the voices and opinions of their particular backers — large corporations — not the American public.

Betsy McCaughey is back. This time, she has stuffed the entire stimulus bill into a large white binder– a sort of fundamentalist bible McCaughey uses to misinterpret the intentions of the legislation. McCaughey is still preaching that the stimulus bill contains provisions that “provide less care” and tie doctors hands in prescribing procedures — but this time, she’s added to her sermon.

In her new comeback tour of Fox News Channel programming, McCaughey regurgitates insurance-industry arguments against the public plan option and argues that the government will import Canadian-style rationing into the American health system. Short: We will all end up like Natasha Richardson:

- On public option: “The public plan will pay doctors and hospitals below market rates, as Medicaid and Medicare currently do, and doctors and hospitals will have to shift those costs to the private health plans, including the one you get at work, and therefore those premiums in the private sector will go up to unaffordable levels.”

- Cost benefit killed Richardson: HOST: So she’s lying there, they have a CT scanner – and it’s my understanding that we don’t know ether or not they used it. But there’s no doubt that what you’re talking about, this cost-benefit analysis, went into that decision. McCAUGHEY: Exactly.

- Critical choice for Americans: The really critical issues here for all Americans is to think twice about whether they want to lower their healthcare costs if it will mean that they don’t get the care they need to live.

Watch a video compilation:

McCaughey’s connection between Canadian single payer health care and Richarson’s death is unclear. McCaughey quotes Dr. Saba, an emergency room doctor at Lachine Hospital, as saying that the hospital had to conduct a cost-benefit analysis before performing a CT scan. It’s unknown if a scan was performed, but McCaughey certainly misquotes the doctor. He discusses cost benefit in the context of deploying a medical rapid response unit — “You have to do a cost-benefit analysis,” Saba said. “It takes time to get the helicopter’s medical team assembled, get the helicopter to the location of the patient, pack in the patient and fly the helicopter to Montreal” — not a life-saving test. In fact, while the United States is generally better equipped to handle medical emergencies, we consider similar factors before dispatching a medical unit.

In fact, any health care system operates on criteria that are based on general characteristics, not individual patients. A fever of 101 degrees triggers a different medical response than a fever of 98 degrees. Similarly, a hospital won’t dispatch a helicopter for someone who broke his leg, but would send a rapid response unit if paramedics believed that the patient sustained internal injuries. In 2005, a study concluded that “60 people have have died in 84 air ambulance crashes since 2000 — “more than double the number of crashes during the previous five years.” The report cited “a 2002 study in The Journal of Trauma that found helicopters were used “excessively” for patients who weren’t severely injured.”

In Canada, publicly financed health insurance plans provide universal coverage to the entire population “while constraining spending and largely protecting the clinical autonomy of physicians.” Canada has lower overall costs, administrative efficiency, and higher satisfaction rates, but it is not without it’s problems. McCoughey’s modus operandi is to distort certain inefficiencies — like longer waiting lines for specialty procedures — and suggest that American reformers would simply copy-and-paste the system.

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When Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) asked health care crisis denier Sally Pipes about her credentials to testify as “an expert” on health care issues before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, Pipes’ lack of any serious background in health care policy exposed her real function. You see, Pipes doesn’t hold a masters degree in health policy or public policy. Nor she does have much experience in academia:

Listen:

With her ‘BA with honors’ in economics, Pipes leads a tiny ‘think tank,’ Pacific Research Institute, and advances special interest (PRI’s list of donors include Altria (formerly known as Philip Morris), Microsoft, Pfizer and ExxonMobil) agendas. PRI promotes itself a s “free-market think tank,” but Pipes offers little in the way of solutions. During her testimony, Pipes simply regurgitated Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health care plan:

If we could change the tax code to level the playing field by removing the tax advantage from those who get their insurance through their employer, reduce state mandates that add between 20-50% to the cost of a premium, allow the purchase of insurance across state lines, and have medical malpractice reform, we could reduce costs and significantly reduce the number of uninsured in this country.

Pipes’ real contribution is her ability to conflate the administrations’ health care proposals with the evils of socialized Canadian medicine and reference discredited health care crisis deniers along the way. For instance, when Braley asked Pipes why “dont’ people who come from your point of view come to this committee and talk about constructive ways we’re going to reduce preventable medical errors” and lower overall health care costs, Pipes quoted fellow health care denier Betsy McCaughey!

The most outrageous moment of the hearing, however, belonged to Chairman Frank Pallone (D-NJ). In trying to keep the committee on time, Pallone accidentally pronounced Pipes as Peeps. Happy Easter, Sally!