Right Wing Launches Smear Campaign Against Popular Health Provisions
Right Wing Launches Smear Campaign Against Popular Health Provisions
Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh warned listeners that the $20 billion portion of the stimulus bill devoted to increasing the use of health care IT would undermine patient privacy. “Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system,” Limbaugh said.
Today, Fox News and the Drudge Report amplified his charge, launching a misinformation campaign against two health care provisions that invest in electronic health records and comparative effectiveness research. “If the government is telling the doctors what they can’t and cannot treat, and on whom they can and cannot treat, how does that create a job?” Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer asked.
Watch a compilation:
Fox News relied on a single Bloomberg editorial by Hudson Institute fellow Betsy McCaughey — which Megyn Kelly described as “a report” — to ascribe motives to provisions that are intended only to reduce health care costs and improve the quality of health care treatments.
The National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, for instance, which McCaughey and the Fox News described as a “new bureaucracy,” already exists.
Established by President George W. Bush in 2004, the Office “provides counsel to the Secretary of HHS and Departmental leadership for the development and nationwide implementation” of “health information technology.”
Far from empowering the Office to “monitor doctors” or requiring private physicians to abide by treatment protocols, the new language tasks the National Coordinator with “providing appropriate information to help guide medical decisions.” This provision is intended move the country towards adopting money-saving health technology (like electronic medical records), reduce costly duplicate services and medical errors, and create jobs.
The Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research is also far less ominous than McCaughey lets on. Since most of the information doctors receive about medications comes from drug representatives and not independent scientists, comparative effectiveness research would help doctors and patients understand which therapies work.
The stimulus bill establishes a Council to coordinate the government’s research into the effectiveness of drugs and treatments, ensuring that America’s health care dollars are used wisely. The Council cannot require doctors to adopt its recommendations, however. On the contrary, it seeks to provide additional medical research that will save billions of dollars in wasteful spending and educate physicians on the latest medical developments and practices.
16 Responses to “Right Wing Launches Smear Campaign Against Popular Health Provisions”
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Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan:
February 10th, 2009 at 10:42 pmhttp://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_mccaughey&sid=aLzfDxfbwhzs
sounds dangerous to me, you decide. I’ll bet Daschel doesn’t turn down medical care even though he is a dinosaur.
Time to move aside
The “Ruin your Health” article clearly points out that it is the ambiguity in the stimulus plan wording that makes it dangerous. Not that it couldn’t be used for good purposes, but that it is worded in a way that does not give clear limitations or goals. It opens wide the doors to health care changes that the President has made it clear he wants to accomplish. Not all of us like those plans. Its not a smear campaign. Its a heads up. The network media certainly isn’t talking about it.
February 10th, 2009 at 11:11 pmFirst, the bill states rather clearly that it is voluntary.
Also, the blog by McCaughey that started this nonsense confuses Daschle’s book with current proposed legislation. Read the bill: I don’t understand where McCaughey gets all that Daschle stuff as relevant at all to what the bill actually says. It’s about IT.
Finally, Fox and Rush are all acting as if this one person’s opinion blog, which seems quite erroneous, is a better source than all of the legitamate and objective commentary out there about this bill. That sounds like very bad journalism to me – quite misleading to say the least.
February 10th, 2009 at 11:45 pmCBGB, I don’t have access to the bill. McCaughey says there’s a “penalty” for doctor’s not doing what the gov says they should do. Where does she get that?
February 10th, 2009 at 11:51 pmAs far as I can tell, it’s from Daschle’s book. I heard on Fox this morning a discussion about this topic, and everyone with these arguments keeps referring to things Daschle said in his book.
The actual bill isn’t nearly as interesting or worthy of controversy :0)
February 11th, 2009 at 8:48 amLooks like they are still working on it!
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c111:7:./temp/~c1112uKOKM::
February 11th, 2009 at 8:55 amHere’s the pdf link for the earlier version of the bill McCaughey is discussing:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:h1eh.txt.pdf
And here is her ‘penalty’ discussion:
“New Penalties
Hospitals and doctors that are not “meaningful users” of the new system will face penalties. “Meaningful user” isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary, who will be empowered to impose “more stringent measures of meaningful use over time” (511, 518, 540-541)
What penalties will deter your doctor from going beyond the electronically delivered protocols when your condition is atypical or you need an experimental treatment? The vagueness is intentional. In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the “tough” decisions elected politicians won’t make.”
But what is bizarre is that the pages she lists for this refer to grants/incentives for turning in electronic data and what the government will do if the institution got (wants) the grants and didn’t turn in the data on time or at all.
Not exactly a doctor being penalized for his care of patients,, is it? Sheesh!
February 11th, 2009 at 9:26 amSo why exactly is this in a stimulus bill, anyway? Why can’t we debate this on the merits? It’s buried in a 1500 page bill with no committee review and pushed for passage so nobody gets time to read it and understand it. If it’s so innocuous, why does it look like someone is trying to push it through without anyone knowing about it?
February 11th, 2009 at 10:10 amFirst of all, Betsy McCaughey’s essay is pure FUD. (FUD == Fear, uncertainty, doubt; it was Microsoft’s strategy to keep companies from buying better products from start-ups in the 1990s.) None of her comments are based on what the bill says; those few that are not completely crazy are based on what might possibly happen in the worst-case reading of the bill. To her last comment, that health care is a growth industry? Read Fisher’s 2003 article in the Annals of Internal Medicine (138:273-287) for a conclusive study that more spending does not, in reality, yield better health.
The bill itself is pretty bad, focusing on a model for health information systems that has proven itself ineffective and inefficient — with the exception of e-prescribing, the benefits of health IT are few and far between, while new problems and hidden costs appear everywhere. However, these systems will be necessary for any true, information-technology enabled health reform, and so a period of government-sponsored adoption may be a necessary evil. See my article Re-aligning Healthcare for more detail.
February 11th, 2009 at 12:16 pmAmazing how utterly stupid this canard is. As a nurse, I can tell you we have had “standards” of practice for years and they were not set up by “the government” but by doctors and nurses working together so medical records can be transferred in some useful condition. The far right’s “chicken little” response only has to do with their need to be blowhards and not at all with what will improve medical care. They make the assumption that we do not have any constraints now as to how we record information about someone’s medical problem. This sort of hysterical response to an improvement in medical care records is not only silly but takes on an untruthful, sinister aspect with their overreaction. Shows how cornered they are these days in attempting to be relevant.
February 11th, 2009 at 1:13 pmAgain, WHY is this in a stimulus bill? It raises the suspicions of any thinking person to bury something like this in a bill that’s supposed to be for an entirely different purpose, and one that is being rushed through without the normal procedure.
Call the right wing “cornered” if you want, but this just provides ammunition for an already suspicious public.
February 11th, 2009 at 3:46 pmIn answer to John’s query. It’s how Washington works. If you put something into a larger omnibus bill, it makes it harder for the other side to vote it down because other than conference committee, senators and representatives cannot go line by line carving the bill up once the committee has agreed on the bill’s language. This is nothing new. Liberals have been torqued for 8+ years of the buried language in Congressional legislation and this has been happening forever…at least since the 1970s when I first started caring.
Now, the real issue here is the creation/storage/transfer of patient records. It is a good thing. Now, this hooey about who is a “qualified user” or what have you. 1. None of us wants Congress deciding this do we? Medical professionals who are treating me need to see my records. That’s it. There have to be consequences if my right to privacy is violated.
By the way, Betsy has a bias. She gets big time support from the status quo in medicine. They don’t want things to change. Even if it is a better thing for all of us. Face it folks, healthcare is the sickest patient in the hospital. And status quo doesn’t cut it anymore.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:04 pmHow Washington works? I thought we were voting for change.
This is too important to try to jam through. If it’s done in the light of day with all the stakeholders having input, maybe it could be done so it works…maybe that’s the change I was hoping for.
February 11th, 2009 at 4:10 pmI’m disappointed to see this in this bill, too, John – because it doesn’t seem “stimulating” enough for what the bill should be about. I don’t see it as hidden, exactly, because the idea was mentioned with great frequency in Obama’s campaign to provide better efficiency. Whether it will provide that has to do with what these other commenters are saying!
I certainly hope that the study it is implementing of how this needs to be done draws heavily on these folks and not, say Daschle-type politicians daydreaming…
February 11th, 2009 at 6:57 pmExcellent article, Mr Schmidt! Yes, that is the kind of debate about this issue that I wish the media and more blogs would cover.
February 11th, 2009 at 7:06 pmThank you, Mari!
you make excellent sense. Whenever the Radical Right wishes to distract everyone from an important subject (especially when they think that they somehow will lose money, they scream about our ‘threatened liberties’ and other claptrap.
To those people (the Radical Right) I will say this:
The next time that you need to be hospitalized–by all means, tell the staff that–due to your privacy fears–you wish to be omitted from all their redundancy protections, and that you are willing to indemnify your hospital and your doctor, in the event of your accidental death: either due to the wrong meds–or even the right meds in the wrong dosage.
That way, your heirs and assigns won’t have a leg to stand on, when they sue medical personnel for your utterly preventable death–which your privacy concerns rendered, null and void.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:57 pm