The Washington Post and zombie Death Panel lies.The newspaper offers a stark reminder of the media landscape and political atmosphere that this crummy health care bill was born into. This highlights the problems for implementation and promised future upgrades to the legislation, should they actually ever be attempted.
The Death Panels were and are simply lies and the Washington Post article fails to mention that fact, instead referring to them only as controversial. The Pulitzer Prize winning non-partisan Politifact.com Truth-O-Meter run by the St. Petersburg Times awarded Sarah Plain’s death panel assertion its online biggest political lie of the year. Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest: Sarah Palin’s Death Panel lie. But some prominent Republicans (including Vermont Gov. Douglas) didn’t clearly reject the death panel claim.
The Post’s Shailagh Murray reported on the Senate passage of the Health care bill which passed 60-39, not one Republican voted in favor.In her summary of why no Republican supported the bill:
Murray says One of the toughest critics, as the debate drew to a close, was Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who last summer had spent months trying to craft a bipartisan reform package with Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (Mont.). Grassley abandoned the quest after the "death panel" controversy erupted in August and the debate took a sharply ideological turn. The Iowa Republican said Wednesday that he concluded that Democrats were ceding too much authority over health care to the federal government, while failing to aggressively contain costs.
This August, the Washington Post’s own editorial page lambasted the Republicans’ Death Panel foolishness, not as a controversy to be debated but as the distorted interpretation it is. 'Death Panel' Sideshow Demagoguery obscures the value of end-of-life planning.
THE debate over health reform has veered into a peripheral and misleading discussion of whether it includes a scheme to pressure senior citizens into pulling the plug. The most extreme misrepresentation has "death panels," as former Alaska governor Sarah Palin colorfully put it, deciding who is too old or too disabled to merit treatment. This is a distorted interpretation, to say the least. The debate threatens sensible policy on end-of-life discussions and in the separate realm of reforming the health-care system.
A recent GMD diary made note of VPR’s Cokie Roberts contribution to promulgating of the death panel lie.