It is evident the White House is trying to regain hold of its messaging on health care, as we saw President Obama barn-storming the country this week hosting several campaign-style town halls.
With the continued chatter regarding former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's discerning claims on her Facebook page that Obama's health care reform proposals would promote "death panels" for end-of-life counseling, the fallout this week has proved the health care debate has gotten out of control.
- Main Entry: dis·cern·ing
- Function: adjective
- Date: 1589
ABC's Snow on World News: "The facts? The provision would create no such panel"; "death panel" claim is "misinformation." ABC's Kate Snow said:
SNOW: At issue: a 10-page section of a thousand-page House health care reform bill. It would reimburse a doctor for talking with a patient every five years about what kind of care they want near the end of life. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin called this "downright evil," asserting her parents and her child with Down syndrome would have to stand in front of an Obama "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide whether they're worthy of health care.
The facts? The provision would create no such panel. It calls only for a consultation between the individual and a practitioner. So how did this misinformation start? [ABC's World News, 8/10/09]
Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.
But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.
Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor).
There is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a cost-cutting measure. But over the course of the past few months, early, stated fears from anti-abortion conservatives that Mr. Obama would pursue a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda, combined with twisted accounts of actual legislative proposals that would provide financing for optional consultations with doctors about hospice care and other “end of life” services, fed the rumor to the point where it overcame the debate.
on her Facebook page.