Evolution of the GOP ‘Death Panel’ Big Lie, from ‘Evil’ to ‘Nuts’

The GOP’s false claim that the House health care bill includes a provision that would set up a death panel that would decide whether the elderly and handicapped should receive treatment was propagated initially by Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor of New York, who is a professional shill for the health-care industry. She first floated the lie in radio interview with Fred Thompson, the right-wing former television actor:

And one of the most shocking things I found in this bill, and there were many, is on Page 425, where the Congress would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go in to hospice care. And by the way, the bill expressly says that if you get sick somewhere in that five-year period — if you get a cancer diagnosis, for example — you have to go through that session again. All to do what’s in society’s best interest or your family’s best interest and cut your life short. These are such sacred issues of life and death. Government should have nothing to do with this. [fredthompsonshow.com, interview archives, 07/16/09]

None of that is true. First of all, just imagine the logistics of “requiring” tens of millions of Medicare recipients to undergo counseling. The staffing costs alone would likely exceed whatever cost benefit that might be derived from euthanizing that many people. Secondly, euthanasia — also known as assisted suicide — is illegal in every state but Oregon, Washington and Montana.

What page 425 in the House bill — more formally known as Section 1233 — actually does is expand Medicare coverage to pay for counseling when people choose to set up living wills and make other decisions about end-of-life issues.

On July 23, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) helped spread the lie in an offical statement from the House Republican leadership:

This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law… [It] is a throwback to 1977, when the old Department of Health Education and Welfare proposed federal promotion of living wills for cost-savings purposes described as ‘enormous.’ At that time, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago decried this effort by saying: “The message is clear: government can save money by encouraging old people to die a little sooner than they otherwise would. Instead of being regarded with reverence, and cherished, human life is subject in this view to a utilitarian cost-benefit calculus and can be sacrificed to serve fiscal policy and the sacred imperative of trimming a budget.”

The next day, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C. — the degenerate right-wing ideologue who denounced the memory of Matthew Shepard by labeling his murder a “hoax” from the House podium when Shepard’s mother was sitting in the gallery — went to the floor and said a purported alternative health-care reform plan would “make sure we bring down the cost of health care for all Americans and that ensures affordable access for all Americans and is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.”

Last Friday, Sarah Palin exploited her Down Syndrome son in order to introduce the term “death panels” into the debate when she wrote, “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

On Sunday, in a surprising move, Palin’s archrival inside the GOP establishment, Newt Gingrich gave cover to the Palin-McCaughey big lie:

“You’re asking us to decide that the government is to be trusted … You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in American who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.”

In his town hall meeeting in New Hampshire yesterday, President Obama took on the death-panel lie head on:

Let me just be specific about some things that I’ve been hearing lately that we just need to dispose of here. The rumor that’s been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for “death panels” that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we’ve decided that we don’t — it’s too expensive to let her live anymore. (Laughter.) And there are various — there are some variations on this theme.

It turns out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, et cetera. So the intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they’re ready, on their own terms. It wasn’t forcing anybody to do anything. This is I guess where the rumor came from.

The irony is that actually one of the chief sponsors of this bill originally was a Republican — then House member, now senator, named Johnny Isakson from Georgia — who very sensibly thought this is something that would expand people’s options. And somehow it’s gotten spun into this idea of “death panels.” I am not in favor of that. So just I want to — (applause.) I want to clear the air here.

Sen. Isakson’s anti-abortion, anti-gay rights and pro-gun positions have earned him the ranking of seventh most conservative member of the Senate by the National Journal. He has been described as “one of the foremost advocates of expanding Medicare end-of-life planning coverage” and was a co-sponsor of the Medicare End-of-Life Planning Act in 2007.

It was Isakson who has added an amendment similar to the House bill’s Section 1233 to the Senate’s bill. In an interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, he was about Palin’s depiction of his provision as a “death panel”:

KLEIN: How did this become a question of euthanasia?

ISAKSON: I have no idea. I understand — and you have to check this out — I just had a phone call where someone said Sarah Palin’s web site had talked about the House bill having death panels on it where people would be euthanized. How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You’re putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don’t know how that got so mixed up.

Sen. Isakson is being disingenuous, of course, when he says doesn’t know this issue “got so mixed up.” His fellow travelers on the right deliberately lied about it in order to scare senior citizens — i.e., their base — into opposing health-care reform.

It’s bad enough that Republicans can only win by lying in order to create a climate of fear — that’s hardly new. But what makes this particular lie so damaging is that it undermines the movement to get Americans to give serious consideration to end-of-life issues.