McCaughey back with more misinformation

Déjà vu alert: Betsy McCaughey is pushing misinformation about health care legislation in Congress again.

Back in 1994, McCaughey wrote a New Republic article that popularized the false claim that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration's proposed system of managed competition. The premise was that she had read the entire 1300+ page bill and discovered this coercive requirement, but she failed to mention the provision stating that "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as prohibiting ... [a]n individual from purchasing any health care services." (Incredibly, her article won a National Magazine Award and she went on to become lieutenant governor of New York.)

It's hard to understate the damage that McCaughey's article inflicted on the Clinton health care plan. The next week, former TNR editor Michael Kinsley slammed McCaughey's piece in his own column in the magazine, and subsequent reporting by James Fallows and Mickey Kaus showed it to be riddled with a number of false and misleading claims. By then, however, her claims had been repeated and disseminated throughout the national media. Hendrik Hertzberg, a former TNR editor now at The New Yorker, told me in previous reporting that "No Exit" was "the low point in the magazine's history since it stopped being sympathetic to the Soviet Union" and Fallows recently nominated her for "Most destructive effect on public discourse by a single person" during the 1990s.

For all of these reasons, it's disturbing to see McCaughey being given airtime on CNBC to promote new misinformation about the Democratic health care plan being developed in Congress. In this case, as Media Matters reports, she's falsely claiming that "the Democratic legislation pushes Americans into low-budget plans." And again, she's using the gimmick of pushing strained interpretations of specific provisions in the legislation ("That's Section 3101") while ignoring other provisions that directly undercut her arguments ("No individual shall be compelled to enroll in a qualified health plan or to participate in a Gateway").

Earlier this year, McCaughey tried the same close-reading gimmick with the stimulus bill, falsely claiming to have discovered that it will create "[a] new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology [that] will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective," leading to "rationing" for seniors.

How many times will we let McCaughey get away with this? It's time to cast her out of public discourse and shame anyone who gives attention to her claims.

Update 6/19 9:40 AM: McCaughey has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal making the same false claim. Under the Kennedy bill, she writes, "you must enroll in a 'qualified' plan or face a fine even if you and your employer are paying the entire cost of the plan you already have (section 161)." Again, the provision described above, which states that "No individual shall be compelled to enroll in a qualified health plan or to participate in a Gateway," is omitted. As TNR's Jonathan Cohn writes, "She has forfeited the right to be taken seriously, particularly when it comes to health care."

Comments

[David]

The Dems have proposed a "magic" plan that will control costs without a mechanism for doing so. That makes it easy rebut the criticism that their plan is too expensive or that it will limit our medical treatments. In reality controlling costs requires a bureaucracy to monitor treatments and make sure doctors are doing only what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. It seems pedantic to focus on whether that bureaucracy will fall under the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology or will be in some other area.

IMHO after the Dems' health plan becomes law we will have to put up with treatment limitations as well as substantial cost overruns.

[Paul Sand]

I see the "no individual shall be compelled" language, but I also see Section 161 which (as McCaughey claims) requires the IRS to impose additional tax liability on filers who lack "qualifying coverage". And (as McCaughey claims) the amount of that liability is to be filled in later to "accomplish the goal of enhancing participation in qualifying coverage."

Am I missing something? (That's not unlikely and, if so, I'd appreciate knowing what it is.)

Or are you really relying on the theoretical distinction between being "compelled" and "getting seriously nicked by the IRS if you aren't in compliance"?

[Howard Craft]

The problem is that she (and the legislation itself) isn't completely clear on what will be considered "qualified coverage". So she is making some broad assumptions in her portrayal of what will be required.

Secondly, the language in reference to a special tax levy isn't specific or certain either.

So its incorrect to imply that a penalty is even a certainty, or that many firms currently offering employee plans could be subjected to it unless they made significant changes in their current form of coverage.

***

I think these are good questions to raise, but it seems we need more clarification prior to passing judgment.