There are hacks and then there’s Halperin

Yesterday he said quite clearly (twice!) that the ACA has “death panels” to be used to ration care. This is not true. He knows it’s not true. He tried to walk it back via Twitter, but his problem is that he said it during a radio interview and it’s on tape.

Let’s not forget that this guy is a senior political analyst for Time magazine, Time.com and MSNBC. And he’s so ill-informed or ill-intentioned that he’d parrot Sarah Palin in one of her more egregious lies.

Why do I say ill-intentioned? Well, read:

“It’s clear that at the time of the passage of the Affordable Care Act and in the context of the presidential campaign, the press did nothing like an adequate job in fly-specking and scrutinizing the whole law,” Halperin said.

Not just the provisions that have already become controversial, about which the president was misleading . . . but other aspects.

I would hope that as we chronicle what’s going on now with the political controversy of the law and scrutiny of the president’s past statements on some issues that we all learn a lesson from that.”

So what Halperin is saying is that the law got a free pass from the media. That will be news to the numbers of reporters who read every page and wrote story after story about it in 2009 and 2010.

One Comment

  1. Eh, this whole topic gets me very annoyed.
    Because as if there wasn’t rationing all along – decided upon profit-driven health insurance companies. Yes, some of that will continue, but in the ACA law has actually done something to impose limits on that. Such as with the administrative cost limits.
    Oh, and by making sure more people actually get any rations. Because as it’s been in recent years, health care has overwhelmingly been rationed to the wealthy, the fortunate, the well-employed. IE: the rations went to the rich, while the unfortunate, the poor, and those hit by the recession, have been denied in favour of it being given in ration to the better off.
    Death panels at profitable businesses have decided that some people will die from complications of abscessed teeth because they’re uninsured & lack access & funds.

    Not much more you could do to stop any form of “rationing” by keeping it all private and keeping the government out.
    Yes, the VA system (socialized medicine) and to some extent Medicare (socialized insurance), rations in some ways… but frankly I think its rationing is a lot more humane than the private system’s rationing.

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