Report: ‘Death panels’ author worked with big tobacco to scuttle health reform
By Daniel Tencer
Published: September 20, 2009
The person credited with inventing the “death panels” claim about health care reform worked with tobacco giant Phillip Morris to railroad health care reform in the Clinton administration, Rolling Stone magazine reports.
In an article in the magazine’s October 1 issue, not yet available online, writer Tim Dickinson reveals that Phillip Morris “worked off-the-record with … writer Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part expose in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means,” Rolling Stone reports.
McCaughey, a conservative columnist and former deputy governor of New York, penned a 1994 article in The New Republic that was credited with helping to kill the Clinton-era health reforms. As RS noted, the magazine later retracted the story. And The Atlantic magazine ran a story in 1995, entitled “A Triumph of Misinformation,” debunking McCaughey’s arguments at TNR.
Now McCaughey appears to be playing a pivotal role in efforts to shut down this year’s health reform efforts. ABC News credited McCaughey earlier this summer with being the person behind the “death panel” falsehood, when she said in a July appearance on the radio program The Fred Thompson Show that the health care reform effort was “a vicious assault on elderly people, all to … cut your life short.”
In that interview, McCaughey asserted that senior citizens would have to face “death panels” to determine their worthiness to continue living every five years.
Last month, Gawker blogger Pareene listed off a number of McCaughey’s more questionable assertions surrounding the health care debate, including her claim in a New York Post article that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, wants doctors to forego the Hippocratic oath and focus on “social justice” rather than healing patients. That article was entitled “Deadly Doctors.”
Susie Madrak, in her blog at Crooks and Liars, cites key parts of the Rolling Stone article:
[W]hat has not been reported until now is that McCaughey’s writing was influenced by Phillip Morris, the world’s largest tobacco company, as part of a secret campaign to scuttle Clinton’s health care reform. (The measure would have been funded by a huge increase in tobacco taxes.) In an internal company memo from March 1994, the tobacco giant detailed its strategy to derail Hillarycare through an alliance with conservative think tanks, front groups and media outlets. Integral to the company’s strategy, the memo observed, was an effort to “work on the development of favorable pieces” with “friendly contacts in the media
