Angry Little Tree

From the New York Times:

A pending House bill has language authorizing Medicare to finance beneficiaries’ consultations with professionals on whether to authorize aggressive and potentially life-saving interventions later in life. Though the consultations would be voluntary, and a similar provision passed in Congress last year without such a furor, Mr. Grassley said it was being dropped in the Senate “because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.”

It’s worth noting that the measure in question was added to the bill by a conservative Republican, and explicitly denounced the scare tactics in an interview. Yesterday, he reversed himself and got on the ‘they want to kill grandma” train, despite the fact that he’s worked on similar legislation for several years.

Newt Gingrich, one of the people who’s been flogging the political talk-show circuit talking about the evil of euthanasia death panel tyranny, wrote a Washington Post editorial in July saying that the same kinds of end-of-life care options were the key to successful heath care reform.

If you are one of the people they are talking to, you are being lied to. You are being manipulated. If you have legitimate concerns about Health Care reform, the liars do not care: they are not interested in making it better. Because improving health care is not as important as scaring you and making their political opponents fail.

I’m almost convinced at this point that health care and health insurance reform is dead thanks to the efforts of the liars: They will not kill the bill, because that would leave them publicly “blame-able” for spiraling costs and the plight of the uninsured. Instead, over the following weeks and months, they will whittle away essential provisions and cripple the bill until it’s both expensive and ineffective. Then they can blame their opponents for “growing the Federal bureaucracy” and “the growing cost of health care.”

There is no reason that this should be possible: the liars are a minority in a minority party that was utterly trounced in the previous election – in large part because their opponents promised to pass health care reform legislation. The liars want this promise to be a millstone around their opponents’ necks, dragging them down during the next election cycle, and to accomplish that they are willing to make your health care worse.

And from the looks of it, they are going to succeed.

I’m feeling a bit grim today. Don’t worry. I’ll get better.