One of the worst actors in the Republican and industry effort to kill health care reform is very well practiced at it. Betsy McCaughey, who you see pretty regularly on the cable channels and op-ed pages, got warmed up for her efforts now way back in the Clinton administration:
At various stages in her career she has been a banker, a Republican politician, and a staffer at conservative think tanks, but she entered the public stage in the mid-1990s in the guise of a dispassionate, independent researcher who considered it her duty to inform the public about the dire threats it faced. Come to think of it, that is more or less the guise Cheney took in warning about the threat from Iraq.
In McCaughey's case, the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction was the original Clinton Health Reform plan. In 1994 she wrote a cover story in the New Republic "revealing" a number of hidden dangers in the Clinton plan that less careful analysts had somehow missed. Unfortunately for McCaughey, most of what she wrote was false. Unfortunately for the Clintons, most of what she claimed was echoed uncritically and became part of the conventional wisdom of why the bill couldn't pass.
McCaughey has been back at it, regularly appearing on the cable shows to spread pure fiction about what President Obama's plan--which hasn't even taken specific shape yet--would do to take freedom away from unwitting Americans who'd just like to have some affordable health care. Because of the frequency and breadth of her unanswered lies all over the airwaves, Media Matters has taken the step of writing to cable network executives detailing her "misinformation" from a "commentary", through to an appearance on CNN last week.
CNN’s American Morning hosted Ms. McCaughey on June 24, with John Roberts introducing her as a “long-time expert in public health.” Mr. Roberts failed to note her previous falsehood on CNN. He then allowed Ms. McCaughey to assert without challenge that the Affordable Health Choices Act “[b]asically ... pushes everyone into an HMO-style plan” and that most Americans will have to “go through what they call a ‘medical home,’ which is this decade’s term for an HMO gatekeeper.” Similarly, on the June 16 edition of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report, Larry Kudlow hosted Ms. McCaughey and failed to challenge her assertions that the Affordable Health Choices Act “pushes Americans into low-budget plans” and that the bill “restricts the choice that other Americans have. If you have your plan and you like it, you may not be able to keep it unless it’s an HMO-style plan.”
In fact, the proposed bill does not require people to give up their health insurance nor does it “push” people into “an HMO-style plan.”
Almost nothing that comes out of Betsy McCaughey's mouth when it comes to health care reform has an actual basis in fact. Nor does it come from any expertise in the issue beyong that expertise developed 15 years ago when she helped kill the Clinton reform effort.
At the very least, any media outlet giving her valuable real estate to spout off the Luntz talking points should explain that she's been a Republican operative fighting against reform for most of her career. It's probably too much to ask of them what Media Matters does: that they live up their "obligation to their viewers to challenge and debunk her falsehoods."