Not the most objective or factually accurate critic of Obamacare. She is a fact-challenged alarmist who relies on hyperbole and bald-faced misstatements of fact. Ass-on-fire is her 'steady state'.
Get a load of this beaut:
In an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Meeting on October 6, 2009,[93] McCaughey advocated gradually extending the minimum age for Medicare coverage upward from 65 to 70 in order to keep the Medicare system solvent.
I don't have to look at the actuarial tables by region, but I'm pretty certain that increasing Medicare minimum ages, even gradually, would exponentially kill more elders in those States where poor health is endemic and intergenerational, much of....Red State America.
Shame on her.
McCaughey published an op-ed on February 9, 2009 and claimed that the Obama administration's pending American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus contained the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, hidden provisions that would harm the health of Americans as well as the healthcare sector of the economy.[69]
She argued that the bill would establish two powerful new bureaucracies: the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research.[69]
McCaughey said the National Coordinator would monitor patients' electronic medical records to ensure that doctors and hospitals treated patients in a way that "the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective" and that doctors and hospitals deviating from the government's "electronically delivered protocols" would be penalized.[69][70]
She said that the Federal Coordinating Council would be composed of appointed bureaucrats charged with a costcutting agenda that would slow the development of new medical products and drugs and ration healthcare for senior citizens.[69][71]
She opined that the bureaucrats would use a comparative effectiveness formula, which, in the United Kingdom, had resulted in a requirement that senior citizens go blind in one eye before the government would pay for a treatment to save the sight in the other eye.[69]
Critics claimed McCaughey's claims were distorted, pointing out that the National Coordinator was not new but had been created five years earlier by George W. Bush[72] and that the 2009 legislation was not about limiting doctors' ability to prescribe treatments but instead establishing a system of electronic records to give physicians complete and accurate information for their patients.[73]
FactCheck.org noted that comparative effectiveness research had been funded by the US government for years but agreed with McCaughey that there would be penalties for health providers that did not use the electronic records system.[74]
The effectiveness research council was a new initiative, as McCaughey had said. However, supporters of the stimulus bill provision said that research funded would provide additional evidence to guide treatment decisions and save lives and money by avoiding unnecessary, ineffective, or risky treatments.[75]
McCaughey's viewpoint was soon echoed and extended by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and multiple Fox News Channel broadcasters.[73][75] Republican US Representative Charles Boustany Jr. of Louisiana, a heart surgeon, added that he feared that comparative effectiveness research would be misused by federal bureaucrats to "ration care, to deny life-saving treatment to seniors and disabled people."[75]
Other conservatives agreed that the legislation could put the federal government in the middle of the doctor-patient relationship.[75] The stimulus bill was passed with the healthcare-related provisions still included. McCaughey urged their repeal so that their potential impact could be studied further.[71]
2009 healthcare reform bills[edit]
McCaughey opposed the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 debated in Congress in 2009. She made allegations about certain provisions of the bills that provided for Medicare payments to physicians for end-of-life and living will counseling and about Ezekiel Emanuel, then an adviser to the Obama administration's budget director and chairman of the bioethics department at the National Institutes of Health.[76]
McCaughey's claims may have inspired Sarah Palin's more high-profile claims that the legislation would lead to so-called death panels.[77][78][79][80] The provisions in the legislation that McCaughey advocated against were removed from the bill before it became law.
In July 2009, McCaughey claimed that a section in the pending healthcare legislation, "Advance Care Planning Consultation", actually prescribed "euthanasia for the elderly" because it included provisions that
would make it mandatory — absolutely require — that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner [and inform them how to] decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go in to hospice care ... all to do what's in society's best interest or in your family's best interest and cut your life short.[81][82][83]
McCaughey's choice of words and analysis were described by The Atlantic's James Fallows as inaccurate and sensationalistic.[81] Politifact responded that the end-of-life counseling was voluntary, calling McCaughey's claim a "ridiculous falsehood" and giving it their lowest accuracy rating, "pants on fire".
[82][84] Factcheck.org called the claims "nonsense" and stated that what that section of the bill would actually do is "require Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling sessions helping seniors to plan for end-of-life medical care, including designating a health care proxy, choosing a hospice and making decisions about life-sustaining treatment."[83]
During an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart which aired on August 20, 2009, McCaughey repeated these assertions about the counselling sessions and referred to the Factcheck.org as "spot-check dot org", claiming they failed to adequately read the House health care bill.[85]
In a rebuttal, Factcheck.org stood by their analysis and provided further analysis, which led them to conclude that McCaughey had misinterpreted the bill.[85]
In August 2009, WNYC's On the Media also addressed McCaughey's claims, concluding that the provision actually mandated that the federal government compensate "counseling sessions" on elder law, such as estate planning, "will writing and hospice care."[81]
McCaughey described Emanuel in a New York Post opinion article as a "Deadly Doctor" who advocated healthcare rationing by age and disability.[80][86] Factcheck.org said this was incorrect and that "Emanuel's meaning is being twisted... he was talking about a philosophical trend, and... writing about how to make the most ethical choices when forced to choose which patients get organ transplants or vaccines when supplies are limited."[87]
An article in Time magazine said that Emanuel "was only addressing extreme cases like organ donation, where there is an absolute scarcity of resources", and quoted Emanuel as saying: "My quotes were just being taken out of context."[77] The New York Times noted that Emanuel had opposed the legalization of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide when such proposals were being debated in the late 1990s.[76]
McCaughey resigned from the Board of Cantel Medical Corporation on August 20, 2009 "to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest during the national debate over healthcare reform", according to a press release by the company.[59] Other reports claimed that she resigned after negative reactions to her performance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart one day earlier.
[88][89][90][91][92]
In an appearance on MSNBC's Morning Meeting on October 6, 2009,[93] McCaughey advocated gradually extending the minimum age for Medicare coverage upward from 65 to 70 in order to keep the Medicare system solvent.
In an August 7, 2012 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, McCaughey described as "phony" an assertion that repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase federal deficits.[94]
In a September 15, 2013 opinion piece in the New York Post entitled "Obamacare will question your sex life", McCaughey wrote:
Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?" Be ready to answer those questions and more the next time you go to the doctor, whether it's the dermatologist or the cardiologist and no matter if the questions are unrelated to why you're seeking medical help. And you can thank the Obama health law.[95]
Politifact rated this assertion as "Pants on Fire",[96] and FactCheck.org also called it false.[97]
In an October 25, 2013 appearance on Fox News, McCaughey said that the Affordable Care Act would have the effect of "eviscerating Medicare."[98]
On her Twitter feed[99] and on television,[100] McCaughey stated that members of Congress and other government employees were granted a "special subsidy" and a "premium illegally arranged by Obama" under the Affordable Care Act. Factcheck.org, Politifact, and fact checkers at CNN all found that assertion to be false.[101][102][103][104]
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