Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska slaps down Sarah Palin’s pathetic effort to discuss health care.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Tuesday told an Anchorage crowd that critics of health care reform, the summer’s hottest political topic, aren’t helping the debate by throwing out highly charged assertions not based in fact.
“It does us no good to incite fear in people by saying that there’s these end-of-life provisions, these death panels,” Murkowski, a Republican, said. “Quite honestly, I’m so offended at that terminology because it absolutely isn’t (in the bill). There is no reason to gin up fear in the American public by saying things that are not included in the bill.”
Sen. Murkowski serves on the HELP Committee, and while she didn’t ultimately vote for the bill that committee produced, she nonetheless had a big part in drafting it. I don’t blame her for being offended. It was actually her Republican colleague, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who introduced the language that was misinterpreted as creating ‘Death Panels.’
There are only a handful of Republicans in the Senate who are still interested in policy. Ms. Murkowski is one of them. Good for her.
How long until she has to walk it back?
Look for more of this now that the reform bill has mutated into guaranteed business for insurance companies without any restraint or competition.
When do some of these folks break with McConnell and the wingnut crowd?
The biggest obstacle to any reform of any type is the unfettered access corporate interests have in financing campaigns. I know that health acre reform is a must, but so is campaign finance reform.
Thinking Republicans will not break with the crazies in the party because they can’t afford to run a campaign. They need the access to donors that the party brings.
It was Grassley all along.
Now can we shove “bipartisanship” up the GOP’s ass where it belongs?
This almost certainly has little to do with Murkowski being interested in policy. She hates the Diva of Delusion with a white-hot passion for ratting out her (Murkowski’s) dad. Even Rush won’t get her to walk it back– this is Montague-Capulet shit.
The Health Care Issue is one of the most hot and controversial topics in the country. Government is trying hard in improving the health care reform. Well, Betsy McCaughey has gone on a real tear. Betsy McCaughey, a journalist of distinction and former Lieutenant Governor of New York state, has taken aim at Obamacare and especially Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, brother to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and in her op-ed piece that’s being billed as New York Post Deadly Doctors, she claims that the public health care plan will deny care to the mentally disabled and elderly. However, nothing in the bill has come to light that would indicate she’s correct, and the oversight agency for the program would be only be staffed by physicians. Regardless of criticism by Betsy McCaughey and others, most still need payday loans for the most basic of care. Visit this site to read more: http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/08/10/deadly-doctors-part-2/
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Sarah Palin got her info about death panels from Michele Bachmann who based her knowledge on the op-ed written by Betsy McCaughey. Don’t expect these “leaders” to think for themselves or do the hard work of reading the facts.
“Rep. Michele Bachmann highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff, in a floor speech to the House of Representatives. I commend her for being a voice for the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.”
Michele Bachmann’s knowledge was based on an op-ed written by Betsy McCaughey, founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former New York lieutenant governor.
As head of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health, and someone who has devoted his life to bioethics issues, Ezekiel J. Emanuel has spent much of his career discussing and writing about some of the most ethically complicated issues about health care reform.
In 1996, for example, Emanuel contributed an article to the Hastings Center Report, in which he discussed “the need for public forums to deliberate about which health services should be considered basic and should be socially guaranteed.”
A Hard-Charging Doctor on Obama’s Team
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."