One example of the lies at the heart of the crusade against health care reform: the lies about Britain's National Health Service

"I'm not standing up here and saying we have the best health care system that you should copy. That's not the intentions of me getting on the radio to you. It's -- I'm making clear that what you're hearing is not just false and distasteful, it's just far from what I expected, someone in these senior political roles, to be disseminating fear against the system."

-- former British health minister Dr. Lord Ara Darzi

by Ken

As I mentioned earlier today, even I was taken aback by the scale of the out-and-out lying being done in the right-wing assault on meaningful health care reform. The famous Luntz memo not only outlined but went into a good deal of detail about pollster Frank Luntz's proposed "messaging" for the health insurance industry's counteroffensive, but I'm not aware that it went anywhere near this far.

The memo clearly did counsel opponents of meaningful reform to make use of human "stories," and specifically targeted foreign health care delivery systems that might be cited by reform proponents as superior to ours. In the case of Britain's National Health Service, that would mean citing horror stories of long waits for specialists, or people denied care -- as if such things didn't happen every hour of every day under our system, which has become more and more obsessively devoted to denying people care, because it's good for the insurance companies' bottom line, which is the true priority of U.S. health care delivery.

Now, the disingenuousness here is splendid. When it comes to health care horror stories, heart-wrenching stories of people falling through the cracks, or rather crevices, of the system, it's hard to believe anyone in the developed world can match ours. Just think, before the so-called "health care debate" began, do you recall going as long as a day without hearing yet another story of someone who suffered irreparable harm from our mess of a "system"?

Nevertheless, it is possible for the deniers to find a usable store of stories of people who have suffered under Canada's single-payer system or Britain's. Of course they're usually ripped out of context. In the case of the NHS, for example, the stories probably date back from the years when the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major basically starved the system, on the apparent theory that God's plan for people who can't afford proper health care is suffering and death. Still, I understood Luntz to be suggesting using actual stories, however carefully torn from context and spun. I don't believe he was advocating what the deniers are doing: just making stuff up. (Or maybe he thought it went without saying that truth wasn't a requirement, and so he didn't need to say it?)

I mention the British system because it was American right-wing lies about the NHS that set me off yesterday on a new round of thinking about the all-lies-all-the-time mindset that is now the Right's political theology as well as the centerpiece of its strategy book.

I was a bit surprised to hear recently from someone who spends a lot of time in the precincts we here at DWT call "Inside the Beltway" that a lot of the people who infest the halls of government listen to NPR when they're in their cars moving around as well as to and from the hallowed District. Of course they know better than the preposterous shibboleth that NPR is a hotbed of liberal propaganda.

In fact, the NPR folks are so obsessed with balance that lately it has seemed to me that Morning Edition has been scrupulously "balancing" the health care debate with a seemingly uninterrupted series of arguments from the deniers "countering" arguments that sure haven't been made while I was listening. Partly, of course, it's hard for anybody to be lobbying "for" the health care reform plan when there isn't one. There are only the bills in various stages of markup before the five committees that have jurisdiction, plus a whole lot of noise from us out here in the peanut gallery.

(Of course that doesn't stop the liars and loonies of the Right from attacking "the Obama plan," or "Obamacare," when even now we don't know what the president believes in, or wants, or insists on by way of health care reform -- not to mention what he's prepared to go to the mat for.)

Nevertheless, for a long while on Morning Edition we seemed to be getting a daily diet of interested parties attacking one aspect or another of "the plan." It could be my imagination, or it could be that somebody there noticed the same thing, but lately we seem to be hearing from "our" side. And yesterday the ME team did a nice job on the hatchet job that the health care deniers have been doing on the NHS.

There was a report on the obscure Tory MP who lent his voice to the movement until he was shut up by his own Conservative Party leader. And then there was an interview with Dr. Lord Ara Darzi, a prominent surgeon and health care expert. You can hear the interview on the NPR website, but here is the official transcript, with just a couple of highlights -- rebuttals of a couple of the blatant lies -- highlighted:

STEVE INSKEEP, host:
The defenders of Britain's system include Lord Ara Darzi. He is a prominent surgeon who just finished his stint as a minister in Britain's Department of Health. He admits British health care is imperfect. Still, he says, it's a fairly straightforward system.

Dr. LORD ARA DARZI (British Government Advisor, Britain's National Health Service): Every patient, or a member of public in England, are registered with a primary care physician. You go and see your general practitioner. Your general practitioner will refer you on and the cost of that referral and the payment of that hospital is made by this local insurer, which we call primary care trust. The payment is made by a single payer.

INSKEEP: Single payer, the government, end of story.

Dr. DARZI: Yeah.

INSKEEP: There had been some reforms in the National Health Service in recent years, and that makes me wonder what it is that went wrong that needed reforming.

Dr. DARZI: Well, the National Health Service has not just come through a reform. It's come through a complete transformation over the last eight years. We did have patients on waiting lists for their operations for a long period of time. We certainly did have shortages of doctors or nurses. And the expenditure in health, back in the year 2000 was 37 billion pounds, roughly $70 billion.

INSKEEP: Mm-hmm.

Dr. DARZI: The expenditure now is 110 billion pounds. That's near enough $200 billion. The NHS in itself has grown by about a third, employing new doctors, new nurses, new hospitals. So, a lot has changed and a lot of the stories that I certainly heard over the last couple of weeks, which is being debated, are the stories of the past.

INSKEEP: So, you got to the year 2000 and found that the government-run system had just not kept up with the needs of the British public. The spending was not sufficient, the number of doctors available were not sufficient, and the wait for particular kinds of treatment was just out of control. That's what was happening and that's what you tried to fix, fundamentally.

Lord DARZI: That's correct. You know, the NHS, the last decade is a different NHS from the NHS the decade before.

INSKEEP: Well, let me get to a specific example that's been cited this month here in the United States. Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican who is deeply involved in health care negotiations, raised concerns about moving the United States anywhere near what Britain has because of an example of a fellow senator of his. Let's listen:

Senator CHARLES GRASSLEY (Republican, Iowa): I've been told that the brain tumor that Senator Kennedy has, because he's 77 years old, would not be treated the way it's treated in the United States. In other words, they say, well, he doesn't have long to live, even if he'd live another four or five years. They'd say, well, we've got to spend the money on people that have more, can contribute more to the economy.

INSKEEP: Okay. Does the British system make that kind of distinction? Here's an older fellow, you've got this treatment that you could give him but it wouldn't add massively to his life expectancy, so we'll deny that. Do you do that?

Lord DARZI: Well, I'm sorry to say that's the most ludicrous thing I've heard. I've heard that written down but I've never heard it in real speech. And the answer to that is absolutely no.

INSKEEP: So, Grassley's comment is based on nothing, so far as you can say?

Lord DARZI: Absolutely -- not just false, these are lies which have been used to set fear against reform.

INSKEEP: Ted Kennedy goes to Britain, he's a British citizen, he's going to get full treatment and that treatment is going to be fully paid for. Is that what you're saying?

Lord DARZI: Absolutely, irrespective of the tumor type as well.

INSKEEP: Let me play another clip, if I might. This comes from an ad that's been running nationwide in the United States, an ad campaign produced by a conservative political action group called The Club for Growth. And they show on the screen, an image of an old man who is mourning in a hospital bed.

(Soundbite of ad)
Unidentified Man: Twenty-two thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars: in England, government health officials decided that's how much six months of life is worth. Under their socialized system, if a medical treatment costs more, you're out of luck. That's wrong for America.

INSKEEP: That's an ad from the Club for Growth. And just to be clear: is there a meter by the bed, in effect, in Britain, and if health care gets too expensive for an individual, you cut him off?

Lord DARZI: Absolutely not. Again, it's the most ludicrous thing I've heard. And I'm just giving an example: the life expectancy in the U.K. is actually longer than it is in the U.S.

INSKEEP: But if somebody gets into a particularly difficult medical situation and treatment is particularly expensive, do you ever get to a circumstance where you say, we're just not going to pay for that treatment anymore?

Lord DARZI: Absolutely not. I'm not standing up here and saying we have the best health care system that you should copy. That's not the intentions of me getting on the radio to you. It's -- I'm making clear that what you're hearing is not just false and distasteful, it's just far from what I expected, someone in these senior political roles, to be disseminating fear against the system.

INSKEEP: Lord Darzi, thanks very much.

Lord DARZI: My pleasure.

INSKEEP: Lord Ara Darzi is a former minister in Britain's Department of Health and a surgeon at St. Mary's Hospital in London.

The coalition of the medical-industrial complex and the birthers and health care deniers and assorted other teabaggers are confident that the American people are jibbering idiots who can be whipped up into a lather of terror and rage by a massive enough campaign of lies.

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