Sarah Palin returned to Fox News’ “business block” today to lend her special brand of acumen to a discussion about Obamacare and death panels. Despite the fact that her “death panels” accusation was rated “Lie of the Year” by PolitiFact, host Eric Bolling joined her in throwing truth out the window as she took what was laughably called “The Hot Seat” for softball questions and a pretense that she has been proven correct.
Simon Maloy, at Media Matters, breaks down Palin’s – uh, evolution – from her death panel accusations about the Advanced Care Planning provision in the House health care bill to her changeup to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) in the Senate bill:
Palin’s first deployment of “death panel” in August 2009 was in reference to the Advanced Care Planning provision of the House health care bill, and she said it would “decide” whether senior citizens and the disabled were “worthy of health care.” This was a lie, and Palin got called out on it, earning herself Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” award.
In December of 2009, Palin switched it up and tried claiming that IPAB (which originated in the Senate’s health care bill) was what she was talking about all along and that “this type of rationing” was “precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.” This was also a lie; the law does not allow for the IPAB to make “any recommendation to ration health care... or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria.”
Recently, some Democrats have opposed creation of the IPAB – and presto, change-o - Bolling and Palin pretended on Cashin' In today that she has been vindicated.
First, Bolling misleadingly asked, “Are a growing number of Democrats proving her right?” The answer is, not really. As Salon explains, “It’s not particularly surprising that a small number of mostly moderate-to-conservative-leaning Democrats would oppose IPAB, considering that 39 House Democrats initially voted against the Affordable Care Act in November 2009.” That number, so far, seems to be 22.
Bolling then mischaracterized criticism of IPAB from Howard Dean by saying he objected to “the panel set up to decide how much health care you and I are entitled to.”
In the first, place, Bolling failed to tell the “we report, you decide” network’s viewers about Dean’s connections to the health care lobby. Secondly, Dean has not said the IPAB would operate like a death panel. In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Dean wrote:
The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.
There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting—the essential mechanism of the IPAB—has a 40-year track record of failure. What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has indicated that the IPAB, in its current form, won’t save a single dime before 2021. As everyone in Washington knows, but less frequently admits, CBO projections of any kind—past five years or so—are really just speculation. I believe the IPAB will never control costs based on the long record of previous attempts in many of the states, including my own state of Vermont.
In other words, Dean believes that while the IPAB has the potential to ration care by rationing costs, the real likelihood is more bureaucracy. More importantly, Dean has hardly joined up with Sarah Palin in demanding that Obamacare be defunded and eliminated. His solution, on the other hand is to do away with fee-for-service medicine – and he explicitly states in his op-ed that Obamacare will eventually lead to that.
You may recall that on July 30, Palin told Sean Hannity that she had not read Dean’s op-ed. Her explanation:
I haven’t wasted my time on it because I think I and others wasted too much time listening to the liberal pundits a few years ago when they said that was the biggest lie of the year …my claim that death panels were a part of Obamacare.
She now told Bolling:
That was a pleasant surprise, and I don’t think that we should condone them for finally trying to jump off the Obama train wreck that’s coming down the pike here. I appreciate that they acknowledge it. Of course there are death panels in there. That’s just one aspect of this atrocious, unaffordable, cumbersome, burdensome, evil policy of Obama’s.
Palin didn’t say whether or not she had since read Dean’s column (but I think we can probably guess she didn’t) but she had a ready answer for Bolling when he asked, “What do you think their motive is for coming onto your side?”
PALIN: It’s in black and white in the law, that there will be rationing of health care. They couldn’t go forever in not acknowledging that or they would look like complete buffoons and they would be deemed incompetent having not read the law to understand that death panels are a part of this atrocity.
Actually, that’s another falsehood. As PolitiFact wrote when it rated “false” a similar statement by Florida Governor Rick Scott, “The health care law rations care no more than nor less than the current health care system does.”
Palin might want to think twice before calling anyone else a buffoon.
So much for that claim that she reads “all of ’em.”
Palin might want to think twice before calling anyone else a buffoon.
She apparently doesn’t think once — getting her to think twice is asking a lot . . .
.