The Un-truthful Politics of Healthcare Reform

I have been doing a lot of research on the Healthcare reform issue and have some info to share that I think you may find helpful. Unlike most people (and seemingly a lot of congressmen), I downloaded the big controversial house bill – HR3200 - and read it. Well, to be truthful I read most of it – it’s 1,100 pages long! But it is reasonably well organized so you can follow along (if you can stay awake). I have read and commented on legislation before, in my work life, since I was involved with the Government Relations activities of my firms so I have a bit of a grip on how these things are constructed.

As is usually the case, the legislation references other legislation through amendments to those laws. Real experts who deal with the topic all the time are well-versed in those other laws so they can immediately understand the reasoning and implications of those changes. I can’t claim that to be that knowledgeable, but many of the changes were seemingly at the margin – essentially tweaks to existing law. The core items in the bill are much more understandable.

I can say this about HR3200 – it has been incredibly misrepresented by right wing pundits, politicians and tea-partiers. In fact, I received a letter from someone who claimed to have read the bill and who pointed out specific pages and sections of the bill which, the writer claimed, contained such items as coverage for illegal aliens, death panels and medical rationing. Using this rather detailed list of citations as a guide, I looked up the sections mentioned. To my surprise, every single citation I looked up said absolutely nothing of the sort. Any congressional staffer with knowledge of HR3200 would have clearly seen through it, but I imagine that many people who received the same email I did would presume that a knowledgeable person compiled it. In fact, it was a complete fabrication. As an example, the writer cited a certain section as allowing illegal aliens to participate in healthcare. That section said nothing of the sort. In fact, what the section said was that the bill would not override state law in matters relating to healthcare.

The writer, and frankly my own congressman, Rodney Frelinghuysen, through his mailings and editorials claimed that the bill represents a “one-size fits all approach” to healthcare. In fact, the bill goes into detail about four distinct categories of insurance (whose parameters would be set by a large panel of government and private experts). Those plans were a basic plan, an enhanced plan, a premium plan and premium-plus plan. Each with a greater degree of covered services and a higher price.

In short, all this talk about rationing, death panels, illlegals, etc are fabrications. And I find it very distressing that many of our politicians not only remained silent in the face of these falsehoods but actually repeated them consistently in their rhetoric. And worse, the press has picked up on these falsehoods and discussed them as if they were true.