Fibbing Is Not Enough This Year

As I’ve said many times, medicine is fundamentally a science.  Diagnosis and treatment is empirical – it doesn’t matter what your ideology is.  Evidence is king.  Yet in throughout the decades-long history of the health care debate, we tend to become obsessed with claims that are either opinion or outright lies, or some manufactured controversy that hogs the attention and makes the atmosphere for progress poisonous.  But we’re starting to see, little by little, the power of fibs subside.

Let’s jump to today’s whopper – a rather preposterous claim that found its way into my inbox this morning from your friend and mine, Richard “His Hospitals Had to Pay an Unprecedented Settlement for Medicaid Fraud” Scott of Conservatives for Patients Rights.  In a fundraising email, the Scott and the CPR croud claimed that Comcast had removed a response ad sponsored by the group Healthcare for America Now because it was “misleading.”  In fact, they crowed, “You can try to change the subject, but you can't lie to change the subject.”

Except, it turns out, they had just lied to change the subject.  Comcast hadn’t done anything.  The ad campaign had run out, as it was scheduled to do, on Wednesday – a fact Comcast was happy to explain.  If this were an ordinary time in our political culture, the fib would win out.  Scott would fundraise off the perceived slight, and effectively change the subject from his questionable credentials as a spokesperson against reform (something even Fox is now picking up on) to the culpability of overzealous performers.  It would get magnified by the noise machine, on Rush and on Fox, and everyone associated with Health Care for America Now would be asked why they were “misleading the public” about Conservatives for Patients Rights.  (Just think of the abuse Acorn took immediately before the election.)  This time, the fibber got nailed, dead to rights.  Who knew that the only true statement in the whole email would be “you can’t lie to change the subject”?

Because throughout our history, it’s all been about lying to change the subject.  No president has ever advocated for a true socialist medicine model, like Great Britain, where the government not only handles the financing, but the delivery: doctors are employees of the government and supplies are managed through some level of central planning or centralized government control.  Not one president.  The furthest left any of them advocated for is for some form of National Health Insurance through a single-payer – but that’s all about financing, and doesn’t touch delivery.  Yet all reform-minded presidents have been accused of socialist medicine.

We constantly hear that any government intervention in health care will interfere between a doctor and a patient and automatically lead to denial of care.  But what the Richard Scotts out there always do is jump to stories of denial of care in foreign lands – no need, guys.  We have government-run health care here, in the form of the VA, Medicare and Medicaid.  You will sometimes hear of a Medicare beneficiary not getting the exact treatment s/he wanted, but anecdotally it’s far less common than hearing the same complaint about private insurance and HMOs.  And you will hear – often from the same people – that we need to clamp down on “waste, fraud and abuse” in Medicaid.  Well, that actually means they’re saying Medicaid beneficiaries are getting too much care – that they’re not being denied care enough!  Which is it, fellahs?

These distortions have traction only if we let them have traction.  The fact that the story of the day was Richard Scott wholly failing to change the subject through lying is a promising first step – especially since we know there will be more and bigger lies coming down the pike before we know it.

(Photo credit: Runaway Wind on Flickr.)