AND THE LIES CONTINUE - RUSH TO KILL AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE

THE RUSH TO KILL AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE.

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Betsy McCaughey gives misleading and false information and Fox News, the Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh run with it. [Side note: Ms. McCaughey received 750 shares in stock options from Cantel Medical before submitting her "op ed" piece to Bloomberg]. Read Wikipedia article and then listen to a segment from Keith Olbermann's "Countdown".

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According to Wikipedia:

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On February 9, 2009, McCaughey wrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg.com in which she posited that the 2009 stimulus bill was "dangerous to []our health".[7] She claimed that the stimulus bill would cause a newly created office to "monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective" which was, in essence, "enforcing uniformity." The portions of the text to which she cites, however, do nothing of the sort. Sec. 3001(b) of the bill, which sets forth the "purposes" of the substantive provisions, does not in and of itself do anything but set forth the reason for the substantive provisions.[8] The bill gives the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology no duties to review actual treatments but only to establish standards for a technology infrastructure that would allow doctors to better guide their patients' treatments and to ensure that doctors are given the appropriate tools to establish a proper course of treatment.
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The "new position" to which McCaughey referred is the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) This position was already established on April 27, 2004, by President George W. Bush, under Executive Order #13335 [9], and was therefore not a newly created office. Regarding the duties of the ONCHIT, the draft House version of the Bill required, in Title XXX Section 3001[10], that the National Coordinator ensure that medical records meet certain technical standards to protect privacy, ensure physician office records can be communicated with local hospitals to prevent incompatibilities and inefficiencies, and other such technical requirements. The National Coordinator is also tasked with ensuring that the public has the opportunity to participate in the establishment of technical standards to ensure that the process be open, and promote competition in the private sector for health information technology. The Bill thus assigns the National Coordinator a technical role analogous to that of the FCC, which may define the technical standards to ensure that cellphones operate within a system, but has no role in determining the content of speech on cellphones, or how customers choose to use them.

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McCaughey's claims that the National Coordinator's office was a "new office" that would control medical treatment was propagated extensively through the media as Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal repeated McCaughey's interpretation of the Stimulus Bill language. [Source: Wikipedia]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_McCaughey_Ross

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