The four best lies about the new health care law.
The new health care reform law is, among other things, a powerful magnet for misinformation. Veteran folklorist Betsy McCaughey got the game started last year with her false allegation that Obamacare would lead to creation of death panels. But even McCaughey might be stunned by the counterfactuality of some allegations in play since Congress passed the two bills in late March. Below are four especially good ones.
Microchip in your brain! "The Obama health care bill under Sec. 2521, page 1,000 will establish a National Medical Device Registry," one reader posted March 25 on the Chattanoogan.com. The reader then went on to quote legislative language, from pages, 1,001 to 1,008 of the bill that made reference to "a class II device that is implantable, life-supporting, or life-sustaining." This device, the reader explained, is an "implantable radiofrequency transponder system for patient identification and health information." Lest you think this is just the ravings of one solitary commenter, be advised that the phrase "health care reform microchip" returns 55,500 results on Google.
Like McCaughey, the new Obamacare conspiracy-mongers strive for verisimilitude by citing precise bill sections and page numbers. But in truth the phrases National Medical Device Registry and Class II device appear nowhere in either the health care bill (searchable text here) nor in the follow-up reconciliation bill (searchable text here, here, and here). The language is from an earlier version of the House bill (the Senate bill never included it) and, you may not be surprised to hear, that language never called for implanting microchips in anybody's brain. It proposed that the Health and Human Services department collect data about medical devices surgically implanted in patients to help the government better gauge the devices' medical effectiveness and alert consumers in the event of a manufacturer recall.
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Do the tea bagger conservative right-wingers even know what they stand for?
