I just received another urgent message from the Democratic National Committee, which continues its civil discourse on the merits of health care reform. It seems that someone else is a lying liar who is telling lies but the DNC does not identify what exactly is being misrepresented. Neither does the video to which it links.
After fighting health reform with lies, deceit, and multi-million dollar ad campaigns, the health insurance lobby — America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) — recently released a report on the “effects of health reform.” Surprise! It’s full of flawed claims that reform would increase costs.Many journalists and experts called the report “deceptive” and “implausible.” Even the firm that wrote it now admits they only looked at parts of the health reform plan — because that’s what the insurance lobby paid them to do. It’s exactly what we should expect from an industry that’s been fighting tooth and nail to kill reform, and is now preparing an all-out assault.
We’re not going to take it sitting down. So this week, we’re calling out the health insurance lobby.
The lobby has invested millions trying to convince Congress to oppose reform. So this week, we’re not simply debunking lies: The best way to Call ‘em Out is to cut through the spin and tell our representatives to say “no” to deceitful lobbyists and “yes” to reform.
Call ‘em Out: Health Insurance Lobby. Send a message urging Congress to stand with voters, not lobbyists.
This isn’t the first time the health insurance lobby has lied, cheated, or used misleading reports. This false report is just the latest salvo in a multi-million dollar offensive that appears designed to frighten voters and bully Congress into opposing reform.
In fact, just days after releasing the report, the lobby announced they will spend a million dollars on a television ad filled with debunked claims of Medicare cuts that could scare seniors away from supporting health reform.
We need your help to call out the insurance lobby and make sure our representatives understand that we’re counting on them to stand strong against their pressure.
Visit Call ‘em Out: Health Insurance Lobby, and help fight back. Share a video debunking the health insurance lobby’s lies with your friends. Spread the word about their deceit on Facebook and Twitter. And most importantly, tell your members of Congress to say “no” to insurance lobby pressure.
Soon, health reform will be taken up by the entire House and Senate, and the insurance lobby will take their attacks to a new level. Their lies will grow more extreme — and it will be more important than ever that our voices are louder than those of the Washington lobbyists.
Call out the health insurance lobby today:
http://www.democrats.org/CallOutAHIP
Thanks for helping us set the record straight about reform,
Jen
Jen O’Malley Dillon
Executive Director
Democratic National Committee
Happy to oblige.
PeteP says:
Considering the Baucus bill is designed to fool CBO 10 year methodology by intentionally starting the new taxes / cuts immediately, but delaying new BENEFITS until 2015, thus casting 10 years of tax income / expense savings against 5 year of the related new expenses…..
October 15, 2009, 6:29 pmAnon21 says:
Does it not? Cause right there, in the message you just posted, they mention “debunked claims of Medicare cuts,” which is a fairly specific deception that anti-reform interests have indeed been peddling. More vaguely, it refers to “flawed claims that reform would increase costs,” which is indeed the problem that various independent media outlets have found in the report. Not that the claim that reform would increase costs is necessarily false, but that the industry report estimates of those increased costs are predicated on assumptions that the report itself admits are highly implausible, and thus the figures themselves are little better than useless.
More generally, civility is overrated. If political opponents are using deception to torpedo one’s priorities–which the insurance industry is–then I don’t think there’s any ethical imperative for one to be civil in pointing that out. Indeed, as Republicans constantly demonstrate, incivility gets media attention.
October 15, 2009, 6:29 pmalkali says:
Outrageous. This mailing from a political party promotes only the view of that political party, and does so in a less than neutral and balanced fashion.
October 15, 2009, 6:30 pmArthurKirkland says:
The message does not identify the asserted misrepresentations, the video may not (I did not check), but the prominently identified website does.
The claimed misrepresenter — AHIP — is identified (for those who missed the AHIP-PriceWaterhouse headlines), making the use of “someone else” to refer to the report’s sponsor odd.
Do you believe the AHIP report provides a sound analysis, Professor Barnett?
This may be a sideshow, however. Today’s reports of a solid 60 Senate votes for reform, if accurate, seem to be more important.
October 15, 2009, 6:38 pmrick.felt says:
I’m going to use this as the Falcon Heene thread. Falcon Heene is pretty bad-ass.
October 15, 2009, 6:49 pmHouston Lawyer says:
The lies and doublespeak being issued by the Democrats in favor of this “reform” are unprecedented. As it becomes clear whose ox is being gored though, the votes in favor will disappear.
The administration’s behind the scenes deal with the insurance industry has kept them out of the fight so far. That can’t last forever.
October 15, 2009, 6:52 pmSteve says:
Wait, Randy opened comments? Hi Randy!
October 15, 2009, 6:54 pmTerrivus says:
You seem to complain a lot about these DNC emails. Too bad you can’t unsubscribe from their mailing list.
What’s that? You can? Huh.
October 15, 2009, 7:08 pmMithras says:
Gracious!
October 15, 2009, 7:12 pmMark Jones says:
Why would he unsubscribe? The whole point of joining a mailing list for an organization you dislike or disagree with is so you can hear firsthand what they’re saying to their own…and then use it against them. I’m sure Randy Barnett is far from the only person to do something like that.
October 15, 2009, 7:25 pmRoger says:
Rick: Falcon Heene was hiding in a cardboard box in the garage. Is that bad-ass? Just another cut-and-run liberal, sounds like to me….
October 15, 2009, 7:26 pmtherut says:
Both parties and all special interest groups send childish propaganda. The sad thing is alot of people think and talk this way. These types of propaganda tell us something about us that is not pretty or intellectual.
October 15, 2009, 7:29 pmBruce Hayden says:
I am not so sure that the votes in favor will disappear, but I do see an awful lot of projection on the part of the DNC. I think that this even exceeds their duplicity in running against the Republican “Culture of Corruption”, when the result was a significant increase in corruption in both Congress and the Executive.
The whole Health Care Reform thing has been duplicitous from the first. The 47 million uninsured was bogus, since it included both illegal aliens and an awful lot of people who could afford insurance, but had better things to spend their money on (like beer and dating). The idea that they could “bend the curve” through Medicare without rationing is also ludicrous. Of course, they are going to ration – that is the one of the big goals here, to cut back on health care spending by rationing. And, yes, that means “Death Panels”, if you take that to mean unelected bureaucrats determining who gets health care, and lives, and who doesn’t, and dies. The Baucus bill pretends to make its numbers by cutting reimbursement rates for doctors and hospitals, at a time when health care providers are already refusing to take new Medicare patients because reimbursement rates are already too low. Those affected vote at the highest rate of any demographic in this country, and so those further reimbursement cuts are politically impossible.
Probably the biggest deception is the reason for health care reform in the first place. The biggest reason given is always the uninsured. But as I noted above, after dropping out the illegals, those who would rather spend their money elsewhere, and those already eligible for Medicaid and the like, there just aren’t a lot of uninsured left, and they could be covered by just expanding programs in place already for a small fraction of the cost of the various proposals before Congress right now.
I really don’t know why this is such a priority right now, in the midst of the probably the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Part of it, I think, is that the Baby Boomers (including me) are getting ready to retire, and the current Medicare model is unsustainable. And, maybe, truly, protecting the legal, involuntarily, uninsured may also be a small part of the real reason. But those two things could have probably been addressed much more effectively and economically by themselves, instead of through increasingly Byzantine legislation.
And, so, many, I think, are left with the feeling that the real rationale is a naked power grab and attempt to create a new permanent dependency to maintain Democratic party power for the forseeable future.
October 15, 2009, 7:30 pmLeo Marvin says:
Stop the presses. I agree with therut.
October 15, 2009, 7:33 pm24AheadDotCom says:
Thanks a lot, volokh.com! I was just doing community service at the library, showing people what blogs are and I pulled up this page. Because of the DNC message, no less than three women clutched their pearls, swooned, and fainted!
I’m just kidding. Why can’t this site concentrate on more important things? For instance, a Yale law professor compared our imm. laws to Jim Crow laws a couple days ago. Wouldn’t discussing that – and looking into his activities regarding ID cards in NewHaven – be a bit more worthwhile?
October 15, 2009, 7:34 pmGene Madison says:
[BlockQuote]Translation: Those opposed, regardless of reason are evildoers, and they will try to charm you with words, but don’t believe anything they say. Cause we care about you, they care about your money. Don’t worry about finding out for yourself, take our word for it, they lie.
Isn’t it funny how there is always a nemesis, and it doesn’t prevent them from sleeping together.
Too bad they didn’t get around to explaining by what Constitutional authority creating healthcare fell under. It still perplexes me.
October 15, 2009, 7:35 pmHarryEagar says:
I have a question. Does any other G8 or G20 country spend one-sixth of its output on medical stuff?
If so, does it manage to cover everybody or just five-sixths of everybody?
Complaints about the putative higher costs of ‘reformed’ medical care seem, considering what we’ve got now, . . . well, I’m trying to think of a more polite word than insane, but I can’t.
October 15, 2009, 7:43 pmAlanDownunder says:
Appeal to civility is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
The DNC was overly civil in not calling out the culprits. Thankfully, others do not mince words.
October 15, 2009, 7:49 pmLeo Marvin says:
The relative readership size of your blog and theirs may hint at what others consider worthwhile.
October 15, 2009, 8:02 pmbgates says:
Complaints about the putative higher costs of ‘reformed’ medical care seem, considering what we’ve got now…
…remind me of the complaints about the deficit a year ago.
October 15, 2009, 8:18 pmAllan Walstad says:
Those damned insurance companies with their lying propaganda! Well, at least we can trust the government to set things straight.
Seriously, the differences between the major players in this fracas are tiny compared to what they have in common, namely the idea that it’s somehow the feds’ business to meddle in medicine. The feds are already massively and unconstitutionally involved in robbery and coercion in the medical market, as in the market generally. Obama and his band of calculating pols think they can score political points by ramping up the robbery and coercion in some ways. Republicans are always posturing in favor of limited government until they get power–then, like Bush, they push their own versions of expanded federal meddling. Insurance companies want everyone forced to buy insurance. Doctors and hospital administrators want an unlimited flow of money to pay unlimited expenses. Trial lawyers want unlimited fees for putatively unlimited damages. Pols want power. What the wrangling is all about is who gets political power and how to divide political plunder.
Real reform would be to vastly reduce the government’s role. That can only come about by confronting and repudiating the insidious notion that people who want medical care have a right to use the big gun of government to rob their fellow citizens to pay for it. Otherwise, it appears we are heading the rest of the way to socialized medicine. Or perhaps just the fascist version thereof, with supposedly private ownership but de facto massive government control and behind-the-scenes buddy-buddy relationships to keep all the bigwigs fat and happy.
October 15, 2009, 8:21 pmloki13 says:
I can’t believe this. You close the Lysander Spooner threads and you open up this crud????
(I’m actually serious. I’d like to comment on Lysander Spooner.)
October 15, 2009, 8:39 pmCareless says:
And yet, you’ll complain when your health care suffers because of this bill, although you won’t do it here.
I don’t think he’s figured out how to turn off comments on the new platform. This will probably be the last time.
edit: and yes, Barnett has a high ratio of reasonable posts that could lead to productive comment threads and suffer because they do not allow them.
October 15, 2009, 9:14 pmbooes says:
hey blog admins,
October 15, 2009, 9:29 pmI just thought you guys should know that your RSS feed is acting a little funky. I’m not sure why, but whenever there is a blockquote for more than one paragraph, only the first paragraph looks like a quotation. At least, that’s what I’ve been seeing using google reader since you guys moved to the new sight.
egd says:
Holy crap, the DNC is uncivil? Clearly the honeymoon of the last 8 years is over.
October 15, 2009, 9:39 pmD.R.M. says:
This is only a relevant question if you make the assumption that the people of the United States should be treated as a collective. Why not complain about the excessive percentage of GDP the United States spends on pornography?
October 15, 2009, 9:59 pmJoe says:
I guess the equal handed libertarian will now expect a comment opened thread with some suspect missive from the RNC that tosses red meat to supporters.
As to their “lies” and such … I’m sure others can help you out, if you don’t know some examples. That is, if they didn’t cite them in previous missives.
Anyway, just read your contribution to the latest Cato Supreme Court Review volume. Neat how the Constitution’s foreign policy provisions are so hazy (well neat for conservatives) and I’d like more on Harlan’s dissent in Lochner, but overall, it was interesting.
October 15, 2009, 10:08 pmpireader says:
DRM wrote–”Why not complain about the excessive percentage of GDP the United States spends on pornography?”
If pornography were a lot more expensive in the US than in other countries, but no better, then we should complain. Loudly.
And that’s the situation in health care.
October 15, 2009, 11:08 pmProf. S. says:
Obama rightfully deserved the Nobel Peace Prize because he and his side have managed to fight off armies of strawmen without ever firing a shot.
October 15, 2009, 11:08 pmWhoppee!, Were all gonna die! says:
The plan limits individual choice, adds layers upon bureaucratic layers and increases costs for taxpayers, seniors, and middle class families. And it can’t guarantee people who have coverage they like won’t lose it.
With Senator Snowe’s vote, the proposal was passed 14-9 despite the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director’s testimony earlier in the day stating that the total impact of the legislation was unknown because of the lack of legislative text to analyze. Even with limited information, the nonpartisan CBO recognizes that the plan will cost $904 billion while leaving 25 million Americans uninsured–all at a cost of more than $31,000 per covered individual.
The alternative fine is only $25,000.00.
Hope ya’ll enjoy your new health plan.
October 15, 2009, 11:22 pmTim says:
If you really think that Obama and the Congressional Democrats can: 1) expand coverage; 2) improve care, and; 3) reduce costs by: a) subsidizing health care coverage for mid-to-lower income persons; b) requiring guaranteed issue with; c) a toothless individual mandate, all to access a fixed supply of medical providers (do you think the laws of basic economics do not apply here?), you will deserve the higher costs, longer waits, rationed care and reduced quality that will surely follow. The AHIP/PWC study, if anything, discounts the premium increases necessarily resulting from guaranteed issue married to a toothless mandate with massive expansion of subsidized care all chasing fixed supply of medical providers. Is it possible the American people are this stupid?
October 15, 2009, 11:49 pm24AheadDotCom says:
Leo Marvin: if you’re going to criticize me, be man enough to give some sort of identifying information. What’s your real name?Do you have a web site? Any chance you’re from Knoxville?
As for the # of readers I get vs. the numbers this site gets, popularity doesn’t equal quality, and it objectively doesn’t equal importance.
October 15, 2009, 11:50 pmbgates says:
pireader, many people disagree with you. Isn’t there anything people who think like you can do to try to improve health care without coercing the rest of us into going along? For all of the left’s self-congratulatory talk about the obvious superiority of their ideas, you guys sure are reluctant to forgo imposing your wishes at gunpoint.
October 15, 2009, 11:54 pmTallDave says:
I don’t understand how the Dems think lying their way to passing this will help them. What are they going to tell seniors when the actual Medicare cuts happen?
October 16, 2009, 12:02 amJPK says:
I love the point about how Our healthcare is so expensive, yet all Our 5 year and 10 year cancer survival rates are lightyears ahead of the contries they claim are so much cheaper. Breast and Testicular Cancers still kil nearly half of those contracting them outside the USA. The other side of things is we get charged more for drugs because If (big IF) you get it in Canada, or the UK from the NHS and other places run similarly, no matter how much it cost to make and develop the drug, only so much can be charged. So the companies take a loss or make such a slim profit (not a dirty word folks) that further research and devolopment is impossible.
October 16, 2009, 12:11 amNo Research, no new drugs.
Part of the reason we spend 6% is that We Can Afford It. If we couldn’t, we’d not be spending it.
And don’t feed me the line about the uninsured. . . I’ve gotten deathly ill without it, and gee, not only did I get care, I lived.
If all care was like a Canadian System, or even the NHS, I’d likely not went, or died waiting for the diagnosis.
No Thank You
trotsky says:
Serious question: Is calling a trade association a liar particularly uncivil? If I called my congressman (R-Humana) a liar, that would be a personal attack. Regardless of whether it was true or false, it would certainly be rude, perhaps violating the Golden Rule. But what’s the point of being nice to corporate lobbying association? It’s 401(c)4 — or something like that — representing a bunch of publicly traded companies. Whose feelings will be hurt here?
October 16, 2009, 12:32 amOther Steve says:
This is the standard argument made by people who suck.
October 16, 2009, 1:44 amNonspecific allegations of lying « Internet Scofflaw says:
[...] don’t want anyone to listen to them. So they send out a mailer calling the insurers liars. Randy Barnett poss the letter and notes that its allegations are entirely nonspecific. They accuse the health [...]
October 16, 2009, 1:20 pm