On Friday afternoon former Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) made the dire and patently false statement that Obama’s health care reform plan could result in a “death panel” killing her infant son, who suffers from Down Syndrome. See who defends the truth and who attempts to defend her in today’s Sunday Show Roundup …
Full-size video at TPMtv.com.
The conservative activist who claims he was beaten up by union thugs in St. Louis while protesting against health care reform is accepting donations towards his medical care because he was laid off recently and … has no health insurance.
James Fallows has a modest proposal: journalists should be informing their readers about the lies and misinformation being injected into the health care reform debate.
Impeached and indicted former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich performed his Elvis impersonation in public over the weekend. You’ll be all shook up after watching this.
Ed. note: Yes, that’s Fabio in the background.
I did not envision that we could get this far down the road toward fundamental health care reform with so little input in the public discourse from physicians. Sure, the AMA has come out in favor of the House bill that includes public option. But where are voices of individual docs whose front line experience with the impediments to delivering quality health care offer invaluable instruction?
My personal experience has been that there remains a strongly conservative core segment of physicians who are wary of reform for temperamental and financial reasons (not to paint with too broad a brush, but a group that is anchored in the high-dollar medical specialties). But I’ve seen over the last 20 years or so, an equally strong segment emerge from the physician ranks: primary care docs who struggle to reconcile the demands of the modern health care financial infrastructure with their calling to make people well (or better yet, keep them healthy).
So where are the family practice docs, the public health docs, the rural practitioners, those who staff the inner city clinics? I’m not suggesting they’re purposely sitting on the sidelines, but they do seem to have been sidelined in this debate. Can we hear more from them? Have I just missed it?
Once you thoroughly unfasten yourself from reality, truly all things are possible.
AJC columnist Jay Bookman noticed that in the latest Investors Business Daily editorial about how the ‘death panel’ will condemn all handicapped or disabled people to death on some horrid wind-swept mountain, the editors note that …
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
Needless to say, Hawking, who is recognized as one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th and 21st century, was born in the UK and has lived his entire life there.
TPMDC checks into a local report that a man brought a gun to a heated weekend town hall meeting held by Rep. Steven Cohen (D-TN) in Memphis. The bad news: Yes, an attendee was packing heat. The good news, if you can call it that: He did so in accordance with concealed weapons laws and was fully cooperative when law enforcement asked him to bring the gun out to his car.
A brutal new anti-reform ad that just ran on CNN a few minutes ago claims, falsely, that under public option, “The government — not doctors — will decide if older patients are worth the cost.” Watch.
The ad is from the 60 Plus Association, whose previous efforts included working to abolish the estate tax.