When I got up Tuesday morning, I walked to the couch, flipped open the top of my laptop, and began scanning the top portion of the Drudge Report. One of Drudge’s links led to a commentary, “Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan: Betsy McCaughey,” on Bloomberg.com. Before walking into the kitchen, I had read Ms. McCaughey’s piece and sent e-mails to Senators Jay Rockefeller’s and Robert Byrd’s offices. When I got to work and turned on my computer, I immediately contacted AARP.
On Tuesday morning, I was fifty-something and in high dudgeon. In my messages to the two senators, I referred to holding a vote on legislation having provisions ostensibly moving the nation towards a federally operated or federally controlled healthcare decision support system (which, I was thinking, would very likely ultimately involve cost-control criteria limiting healthcare procedures for senior citizens) without open deliberation “a stratagem of a skulking coward.” I challenged the senators to “refute Ms. McCaughey’s assertions, publicly outline a detailed healthcare rationing scheme, or vote against legislation whose rationally expectable outcome includes the blinding, maiming, and death of senior citizens.” On Tuesday morning, I had cause for alarm, an anticipation of an imminent Senate vote on the stimulus legislation, and no time to spend using search engines, reading, analyzing, rereading, reanalyzing, etc. Ms. McCaughey’s assertions were my working intellectual, emotional, and polemical assumptions.
The following morning, I received a response from AARP, decrying that “opponents of health care reform have begun using scare tactics and misleading the public to keep us from fixing our broken health care system,” referring to a subject provision in stimulus legislation as “comparative effectiveness research,” defining “comparative effectiveness research” as “a wonky term that means the ability to compare different kinds of treatments to find out which one works best for which patient,” and asserting that “it is patently false to say this provision will lead to the rationing of care.”
On Wednesday morning, high dudgeon was replaced with distress about possible damage to my credibility. I decided to turn the possible fiasco into an epistemological object lesson, and press towards some public resolution of questions raised by differing characterizations of healthcare information-technology provisions in the stimulus bill. I began the endeavor with Ms. McCaughey. I forwarded the AARP response to her Bloomberg.com-indicated e-mail account, urging “that you either show the AARP response to be incorrect or issue a public retraction of or public correction(s) to your Feb. 9, 2009, commentary.”
(to be continued)