The Media: Betsy McCaughey and Karl Rove Healthcare Reform Liars for Hire
The Wall Street Journal today serves up two conservative attacks on President Obama’s health care effort. The former Bush adviser Karl Rove notes that President Obama has made a cost-cutting target of the Medicare Advantage program, which is a variety of Medicare offered by private insurers.
One in five Medicare enrollees use Medicare Advantage, Mr. Rove says, and they will probably have to switch coverage if the program is curtailed or dropped. He cites that as evidence that the president is not telling the truth when he says people who like the insurance they have can keep the insurance they have.
But Mr. Rove may not be fully forthcoming in this statement:
Medicare Advantage also has built-in incentives to encourage insurers to offer lower costs and better benefits. It’s a program that puts patients in charge, not the government, which is why seniors like it and probably why the administration hates it.
What Mr. Rove doesn’t say is that a reason the Obama adiministration “hates” Medicare Advantage is that it costs the federal government a lot more money than plain-old Medicare. Private insurers receive federal subsidies to offer Medicare Advantage as an alternative to regular government-run Medicare. Studies have shown that Medicare Advantage costs the government about 13 percent more per patient than providing Medicare benefits directly to the public.
Sharing op-ed room with Mr. Rove at The Journal is Betsy McCaughey, the former New York lieutenant governor who lately has been helping lead the attack against the Obama health effort by arguing that it will lead to Big Government death panels. In this column she does a medical work-up on President Obama’s health adviser, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.
Dr. Emanuel is an oncologist and bioethicist, whose years of writing about the societal and personal implications of medical spending have enabled critics like Ms. McCaughey to selectively quote him in support of their death-panel thesis — even though many other analysts find nothing in the current health care bills to support that view.
Among the evidence Ms. McCaughey offers in her piece is a 1996 article Dr. Emanuel published in a bioethics journal, in which he wrote that as society considers which medical procedures it can afford to provide, it may need to set limits. “An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia,” Dr. Emanuel wrote, in what has become a favorite gotcha quote for those in the McCaughey camp.
Another perspective on Dr. Emanuel’s viewpoints was presented in this profile in The New York Times on Monday, in which he addressed that infamous quote, saying he meant to describe a consensus held by others — not his personal view:
“Maybe if I had been a smarter, more careful thinker about how people could interpret it, I would have qualified it and condemned it more robustly,” he said. “In my 1.2, 1.3 million written words, you can’t find another sentence that even comes close to advocating that in my voice. When I advocate, I’m not shy.”
