Correcting Health Care Reform Lies

There are people who have a vested interest in keeping the American health care system broken. Those people are the health insurance industry execs who are making millions of dollars and the politicians they have bought off. These people have hired PR firms to spread lies about health care reform in order to scare everyday Americans into fighting against their own self interest (which is obviously for health care reform.) These are the people behind the orchestrated anti health care reform noise at the town hall meetings across America. This is nothing "grass roots" about that movement. It is a manipulation of uninformed people (many of these folks don't even know that Medicare is government run health insurance) into fighting for the interests of the health insurance industry rather than for the American people.

If lies are left unchecked then they often become generally accepted by a large portion of the population. This is why it's so important to reject each of these anti-health reform lies strongly. It's important to let people know that when they repeat these lies they are simply parroting the fear mongering tactics of the health insurance industry which has no interest in health care, only in continuing to rake in huge profits (their profits actually went up by over 7 times from 2000 to 2007.)

"Rationing" is one of the biggest lies being spread about health care reform. These folks say that somehow having a government run health insurance option ("the public option") will create some kind of "rationing" that doesn't take place with our current system. The truth is that health care reform is designed to decrease the rationing that the health insurance industry currently takes part in! You see they make more money by denying your care.

The euthanasia lie is probably the most distasteful one being spread. What could be worse than telling people that the government is going to kill your grandma? This is the same kind of lie that right wingers told about Medicare when it was first introduced in the 1960s. They were full of it then, and they are full of it today. There is absolutely nothing to do with euthanasia or Sarah Palin's fantasy "death panels" included in health reform. This is an entirely baseless lie. And a despicable one at that. Shouldn't these people be called out for spreading such a disgusting lie? If they are willing to tell lies like this, why should anyone believe anything they say?

Another big lie is that health care reform will be expensive. What would really be expensive is not doing health care reform. Our current system is headed towards bankruptcy rather quickly. Health insurance premiums are going through the roof. A big part of what this reform is aimed at doing is controlling costs. In fact the economic reasons to implement a "public option" (or even better true "single payer" universal health care) are just as strong as the health reasons.

The final point I want to leave you with is to remember that the "public option" is just that. An option. It will not force people into a government run health insurance plan. If you want to stick with your private health insurance plan, that's up to you. What the "public option" is designed to do is to create competition for the private health insurance industry so that they cannot continue to gouge their customers with skyrocketing premiums. And it's designed to give an "option" for those who don't trust the health insurance companies not to take away their health care.

Why wouldn't you trust the insurance companies? Why would you? Did you know that there's currently about a 50% chance that your private health insurance will be taken away from you, using any reason they can come up with, if you get really sick or injured and need significant coverage? They call that "cutting costs." I call that criminal. What's the point of having health insurance coverage if it can be taken away from you when you need it most?