Back in 2003, Republican leaders praised the AARP for its support of President Bush's unfunded and deeply flawed Medicare prescription benefit. But now that the 40 million member organization has endorsed the House Democrats' health care reform bill, the GOP is declaring war on its one-time ally. Helping lead the attack is an array of industry-funded front groups and their reactionary has-been spokesmen like Pat Boone.

Last week, Republican Congressmen Dave Reichert (R-WA) and Mike Pence (R-IN) implied the nation's leading organization for seniors was in for the ACORN treatment from the GOP and its media allies. Despite the thorough debunking of right-wing claims that Democratic health care reform proposals would slash Medicare benefits for46 million American elderly:

Pence and Reichert suggested that support was the result of corruption inside the AARP and not based on the interests of its membership.

"What you've got here is a backroom deal," Pence said of reform measures expected to be introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon. "Democrats are protecting the salaries of the heads of groups like AARP while cutting Medicare"...

The GOP is using more than just rhetoric to go after the group. Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA) claims to have launched an investigation into AARP in his home state. Reichert says his "ongoing" investigation focuses on whether AARP should be classified as an insurance company because of its revenue from royalties the group gets from licensing its brand for insurance products.

Sounding the clarion call for conservatives is aging singer turned World Net Daily regular Pat Boone. Boone, who in recent months branded Barack Obama a "president without a country" who is "waterboarding America" over "socialistic health care and a host of other ultraliberal causes," is also the celebrity mouthpiece for the 60 Plus Association.

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A gaffe, Michael Kinsley famously mused, is what results when a politician inadvertently tells the truth. And so it was Monday when Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch came clean about his party's scorched-earth opposition to health care reform being championed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats. Hatch acknowledged, as I've long argued, that the GOP is worried not that Obama's health care initiatives might fail, but that they might succeed.

As he did in his pivotal effort to block Bill Clinton's health care efforts starting in 1993, conservative strategist Bill Kristol warned his Republican allies then as now that that a victory for President Obama would earn his party the thanks of a grateful public and guarantee Democratic majorities for the foreseeable future. In an interview with CNS Monday, Senator Hatch revealed that was his darkest fear as well:

HATCH: That's their goal. Move people into government that way. Do it in increments. They've actually said it. They've said it out loud.

Q: This is a step-by-step approach --

HATCH: A step-by-step approach to socialized medicine. And if they get there, of course, you're going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody's going to say, "All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party."

Q: They'll have reduced the American people to dependency on the federal government.

HATCH: Yeah, you got that right. That's their goal. That's what keeps Democrats in power.

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Back in September, a study by Harvard Medical School found that over 44,000 Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance. Now, in a complete reversal of both logic and the truth, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced that it is the availability of a public insurance option which could prove fatal. Of course, McConnell's announcement that the public option "may cost you your life" should come as no surprise. After all, in July he echoed George W. Bush and Tom Delay in declaring that thanks to the emergency room, Americans "don't go without health care."

Mitch McConnell's latest fear-mongering came during an appearance on Dennis Miller's radio show. Blasting the "opt-out" version of the public option in the Senate bill, the Senator from the state ranked 45th in health care performance insisted access to coverage could be deadly:

MCCONNELL: Well, it doesn't make any difference frankly whether you opt-in or you opt-out, it's still a government plan. You know, Medicaid, the program for the poor now, states can opt-out of that, but none of them have. I think if you have any kind of government insurance program, you're going to be stuck with it and it will lead us in the direction of the European style, you know, sort of British-style, single payer, government run system. And those systems are known for delays, denial of care and, you know, if your particular malady doesn't fit the government regulation, you don't get the medication.

MILLER: Right.

MCCONNELL: And it may cost you your life. I mean, we don't want to go down that path.

While he has generally left the myth-making about "death panels" and "pulling the plug on grandma" to Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley and other tall tale tellers in the GOP, Senator McConnell has otherwise been fabricator-in-chief when it comes to Republican talking points on health care.

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In the wake of its shocking assessment that employer-provided health insurance now covers only 54.6% of the American people, Thomson Reuters released a disturbing assessment of wasteful spending in the U.S. health care system. Echoing the estimates of Obama OMB chief Peter Orszag and others, the analysis highlighted by Keith Olbermann Tuesday concluded that the United States wastes up to $700 billion a year - a third of the nation's total $2 trillion health care spending.

As Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters and author of the white paper, put it:

"The bad news is that an estimated $700 billion is wasted annually. That's one-third of the nation's healthcare bill. The good news is that by attacking waste, healthcare costs can be reduced without adversely affecting the quality of care or access to care. That's the point of this report - to identify areas in the healthcare system that can generate game-changing savings."

Those game-changing savings, TR found, could be found across a broad range of health care spending. Between $600 billion and $850 billion, it estimated, is wasted on:

• Unnecessary Care (40% of healthcare waste): Unwarranted treatment, such as the over-use of antibiotics and the use of diagnostic lab tests to protect against malpractice exposure, accounts for $250 billion to $325 billion in annual healthcare spending.
• Fraud (19% of healthcare waste): Healthcare fraud costs $125 billion to $175 billion each year, manifesting itself in everything from fraudulent Medicare claims to kickbacks for referrals for unnecessary services.
• Administrative Inefficiency (17% of healthcare waste): The large volume of redundant paperwork in the U.S healthcare system accounts for $100 billion to $150 billion in spending annually.
• Healthcare Provider Errors (12% of healthcare waste): Medical mistakes account for $75 billion to $100 billion in unnecessary spending each year.
• Preventable Conditions (6% of healthcare waste): Approximately $25 billion to $50 billion is spent annually on hospitalizations to address conditions such as uncontrolled diabetes, which are much less costly to treat when individuals receive timely access to outpatient care.
• Lack of Care Coordination (6% of healthcare waste): Inefficient communication between providers, including lack of access to medical records when specialists intervene, leads to duplication of tests and inappropriate treatments that cost $25 billion to $50 billion annually.

But in its catalog of health care spending horrors, however, Thomson Reuters may have understated potential savings in one area while overstating them in another.

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While the Obama White House, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Congressional Democrats debate among themselves whether the so-called "opt out" public health insurance option endorsed by Reid will be included in reform legislation, Minnesota Governor and GOP presidential wannabee Tim Pawlenty has already weighed in. Asked if he would "lead a charge" in his state to opt out, Pawlenty replied, "I think so because I don't like government run health care."

That's easy for him to say. As it turns out, Minnesota is the exception that proves the rule of red state socialism. An increasingly blue state with the 4th best health care system in the nation, the Land of 10,000 Lakes sends far more tax dollars to Washington than it receives in federal spending in return. But for Pawlenty's fellow Republican refuseniks, leaders of red states offering dismal health care and a beneficiaries of a one-way transfer of taxpayer funds from DC, opting out may not be an option.

In recent weeks, Texas secessionists and Georgia legislators have echoed Pawlenty's confused reading of the Tenth Amendment by endorsing a state veto over federal health reform mandates. But just in time for the debate over the merits of a state-by-state "opt out" of a national public health insurance option, the Commonwealth Fund has released its 2009 state health care scorecard. As in 2007, the data reveals the critical condition of red state health care. All of which could present Republican governors and legislatures with a dilemma: Will they refuse to offer lower cost insurance coverage for their residents by rejecting a system funded in part by blue state taxpayers?

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In recent days, Republican leaders have scored a series of political victories in their eternal quest for tort reform. Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) told Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) that an onerous package of malpractice curbs he championed could save the government an estimated $54 billion over 10 years. That came on the heels of President Obama's latest offer to support limited tort reform as an olive branch to recalcitrant Republicans balking at his health care proposals, including funding for a $25 million pilot program.

But largely overlooked in the heated discussions of damage award caps, special health courts, expert panels and national compensation schedules is the inescapable truth that the medical malpractice system has only a negligible impact on overall American health care costs. Republican horror stories of a torrent of baseless malpractice suits producing "jackpot justice" that fuels rising premiums for physicians and patients alike while driving doctors from practice simply don't comport with reality. The overstated, overblown, over the top and often outright false GOP claims suggest that the Republicans' real target is not the flawed American malpractice system, but instead the nation's trial lawyers whose campaign contributions help bankroll the Democratic Party.

Here, then, is a look at Republican Malpractice Myths:

1. An Explosion of Malpractice Litigation
2. A System Plagued by Frivolous Lawsuits
3. Rising Damage Awards Key to Higher Malpractice Premiums
4. Rising Malpractice Insurance Rates Driving Doctors from Practice
5. Medical Malpractice Reform Would Save U.S. $200 Billion Annually
6. Defensive Medicine Costs $200 Billion a Year

For the details and data behind each, continue reading.

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Seemingly with each passing day, General Stanley McChrystal grows in the esteem of President Obama's conservative foes. After having savaged General Eric Shinseki for his pre-Iraq war testimony that the occupation would require "several hundreds of thousands" of American troops, Republicans have seized on McChrystal's public demands for more forces in Afghanistan as their latest battering ram to bludgeon Obama on national security. And as it turns out, McChrystal's inadvertent leak earlier this month regarding a classified CIA analysis puts him in the same company as Republicans John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Pat Roberts and, of course, Dick Cheney.

McChrystal in his leaked report and unprecedented public speech in London has put tremendous pressure on President Obama to quadruple the Bush-era commitment to the Afghan conflict. General McChrystal didn't merely announce that short of deploying as many as 60,000 more troops, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan "will likely result in failure." He also set out to demolish straw man alternatives to his escalated counterinsurgency plan, including:

"A paper has been written that recommends that we use a plan called 'Chaosistan', and that we let Afghanistan become a Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside."

But as Newsweek reported, that "paper" to which General McChrystal casually referred is almost surely a classified CIA assessment:

Two U.S. intelligence officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter, say that the reference almost certainly comes from a recently published, and secret, CIA analysis titled "Chaosistan" (not "Chaostan"). Prepared by a "red team" of CIA analysts, the document, says one official, picks apart conventional analyses of the war and explains how forces inside Afghanistan--from hostile ethnic groups to intrusive neighbors to societal damage caused by past Taliban rule--work against the notions of a central Afghan government. The paper is not quite the policy proposal McChrystal implied it was, say the officials, since intelligence analysts don't generally recommend policy options.

Of course, the same Republican voices which lauded the leak of McChrystal's report and his UK grandstanding will doubtless remain silent now. Because while many in the GOP called for the prosecution of those behind the publication of the NSA domestic surveillance story, they themselves selectively leaked classified national security information for partisan political purposes.

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Among the most pernicious and blatantly false Republican talking points designed to obstruct health care reform is the fear-mongering claim that Democratic proposals will lead to "rationing." Of course, with almost 50 million uninsured and another 25 million underinsured, Mitch McConnell's dystopian future of a system which "denies, delays, or rations health care" is already today's nightmare for millions of Americans. But as it turns out, recent studies show that the market failure that is the crumbling U.S. health care system is producing a another, often hidden crisis: self-rationing.

As McClatchy reported last week, a new Consumers Union survey revealed that due to skyrocketing costs and reductions in coverage, Americans are forced to deny themselves needed medical treatment. Among the findings of CU's poll of a 1,002 respondents:

In the new poll 59 percent said that the cost of their health care had increased more than their other expenses over the past two years. Fifty-one percent said they had faced difficult health care choices in the past year. The most common responses were putting off a doctor visit because of cost (28 percent), not being unable to afford medical bills or medication (25 percent), and putting off a medical procedure because of cost (22 percent).

Twenty-eight percent said they had lost or experienced cutbacks in their health care coverage in the past year. The greatest concerns about health care expressed by respondents were a major financial loss or setback from medical cost due to an illness or accident (73 percent), not being able to afford health care in the future (73 percent), necessary care being denied or rationed by health insurance companies (73 percent), and the prospect of rising costs forcing them to choose between health care and other necessities (64 percent).

Those dismal results echoed the shocking revelations from an April 2009 Thomson Reuters survey.

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Just in time for the debate over the merits of a state-by-state "opt out" of a national public health insurance option, the Commonwealth Fund has released its 2009 state health care scorecard. As in 2007, the data reveals the critical condition of red state health care. All of which could present Republican governors and legislatures with a dilemma: will they refuse to offer lower cost insurance coverage for their residents by rejecting a system funded in part by blue state taxpayers?

Given the contentious ongoing debate in the Senate, crystal ball-gazing for any public option, whether national, opt-in or opt-out is premature. But the Commonwealth Fund's analysis of health care indicators shows the stakes for its red state opponents. While nine of the top 10 performing states voted for Barack Obama in 2008, four of the bottom five (including Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Louisiana) and 14 of the last 20 backed John McCain. (That at least is an improvement from the 2007 data, in which all 10 cellar dwellers had voted for George W. Bush three years earlier.)

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As the United States ponders its next steps following this week's multiparty talks with Iran over its nuclear program, many of the cast of characters from Tehran fiascos past are coming out of the woodwork to weigh in once again. On Friday, the pardoned Iran/Contra architect Elliot Abrams emerged on Fox News to suggest that Iranians "would not rally around the flag" in response to a U.S. military strike. Meanwhile, Michael Ledeen surfaced on the pages of the Wall Street Journal to warn "change in Iran requires a change in government." Of course, Ledeen conveniently omitted his own nefarious role in the Iran/Contra scheme of the Reagan administration, a which policy consisted of giving the mullahs in Iran a cake, a Bible - and U.S. arms.

The Iran-Contra scandal, as you'll recall, almost laid waste to the Reagan presidency. Desperate to free U.S. hostages held by Iranian proxies in Lebanon, President Reagan provided weapons Tehran badly needed in its long war with Saddam Hussein (who, of course, was backed by the United States). In a clumsy and illegal attempt to skirt U.S. law, the proceeds of those sales were then funneled to the contras fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And as the New York Times recalled, Reagan's fiasco started with an emissary bearing gifts from the Gipper himself:

A retired Central Intelligence Agency official has confirmed to the Senate Intelligence Committee that on the secret mission to Teheran last May, Robert C. McFarlane and his party carried a Bible with a handwritten verse from President Reagan for Iranian leaders.

According to a person who has read the committee's draft report, the retired C.I.A. official, George W. Cave, an Iran expert who was part of the mission, said the group had 10 falsified passports, believed to be Irish, and a key-shaped cake to symbolize the anticipated ''opening'' to Iran.

The rest, as they say, is history. After the revelations regarding his trip to Tehran and the Iran-Contra scheme, a disgraced McFarlane attempted suicide. After his initial denials, President Reagan was forced to address the nation on March 4, 1987 and acknowledge he indeed swapped arms for hostages (video here):

"A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. As the Tower board reported, what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages."

Of course, the sad saga didn't end there.

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During the 2008 presidential campaign, I documented 10, then 10 more and yet another 10 moments in the extremism of Mike Huckabee. Now, fresh off his victory in the straw poll at the so-called Values Voters Summit, the one-time Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor turned Fox News host called for the United States to leave the United Nations. Following his use of the late Ted Kennedy to fight mythical "death panels" and his tacit endorsement of ethic cleansing in the Middle East, the 2012 White House hopeful's latest statements can mean only one thing.

It's time for still another 10 moments in the extremism of Mike Huckabee:

31. Huckabee Calls for the U.S. to Leave the UN
32. Huckabee Uses Ted Kennedy to Push Death Panels Myth
33. Huckabee Warns of "Union of American Socialist Republics"
34. Huckabee Says Governors Should Ignore Court Rulings
35. Huckabee Sees "Hand of God" in Prop 8 Victory
36. Huckabee Claims Civil Rights of Gays Not Being Violated
37. Huckabee Opposes Two-State Solution in Middle East
38. Huckabee Calls for Abolition of IRS and Putting Politics in the Pulpit
39. Huckabee Parrots GOP's "Club Gitmo" Talking Point
40. Huckabee Headlines Electromagnetic Pulse Conference

31. Huckabee Calls for the U.S. to Leave the UN
The United Nations has been a favorite right-wing punching bag for generations, the bogeyman of Birchers and Birthers alike. At this weekend's "How to Take Back America" shindig (an event which featured sessions such as "How to Recognize Living under Nazis & Communists"), Mike Huckabee added his name to the list.

Looking to top John Bolton's hypothetical about lopping off 10 floors of the United Nations building, Huckabee called for casting the whole institution into the sea. To a standing ovation, Huckabee declared:

"It's time to get a jackhammer and to simply chip that part of New York City. Let it float into the East River, never to be seen again."

32. Huckabee Uses Ted Kennedy to Push Death Panels Myth
In their ever-escalating effort to derail health care reform, Republicans from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to Obama's ersatz negotiating partner Chuck Grassley warned of mythical government "death panels" which would "pull the plug on grandma."

To make his version of the case, Governor Huckabee turned to the example of the late Senator Kennedy. Just moments after criticizing Democrats for defying "good taste" by claiming "Congress must hurry and pass the health care reform bill and do it in his memory," Huckabee announced:

"It was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them. Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He chose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments."

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That the elderly of all groups of Americans most strongly oppose President Obama on health care reform shows the success of Republican fear-mongering over supposed Medicare cuts and "death panels". And on Monday, the Washington Post did the GOP a great service in a piece titled, "On Medicare Spending, a Role Reversal." While exploring the impact of projected savings in the program that serves 46 million Americans, the Post left unchallenged the Republicans' laughable claim to be the new protectors of Medicare after decades of war against it.

Readers who stopped after the first two paragraphs could be forgiven for wrongly assuming that the party that brought you Medicare would now kill it but for the stalwart defense of the Republican Party. After the subhead declaring, "Republicans, Not Interest Groups, Fight Plans to Cut $400 Billion Over 10 Years," the Post's Lori Montgomery concluded:

After years of trying to cut Medicare spending, Republican lawmakers have emerged as champions of the program, accusing Democrats of trying to steal from the elderly to cover the cost of health reform.

It's a lonely battle. The hospital associations, AARP and other powerful interest groups that usually howl over Medicare cuts have also switched sides.

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Turning to Sarah Palin to explain the international economy and the role of government is like asking a dog why it likes to lick its rear end. But as an audience of investors and fund managers learned today in Hong Kong, Palin's cartoon-quality conservative platitudes don't merely fly in the face of the consensus of economic analysts. As a flashback to her catastrophic interview with Katie Couric reveals, Sarah Palin doesn't even agree with herself.

Palin's rewriting of history begins with the causes of the global economic meltdown. While the villains behind the calamity are many (see, for example, Time and the New York Times' excellent series, "The Reckoning"), for Sarah Palin there is only one. As the Wall Street Journal summed up her closed-door remarks:

"We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place," the former Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate said Wednesday at a conference sponsored by investment firm CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. "We're not interested in government fixes, we're interested in freedom," she added.

Of course, those "government fixes" were not only badly need to stem the financial crisis, they've already paid huge dividends in reversing the slide of American gross domestic product (GDP), refilling empty state coffers and preserving up to a million jobs. As the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal put it three weeks ago:

"Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter -- something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus."

And during the 2008 campaign, then Governor Palin agreed about the need for government intervention. In her own confused and incoherent way, Palin defended to Katie Couric one year ago this week the kind of government bailouts she now decries. The benefits from $700 billion plan she and running John McCain endorsed, she insisted, all fall "under the umbrella of job creation."

"Ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up the economy- Helping the -- Oh, it's got to be about job creation too. Shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans."

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As he awaits trial on money laundering charges, disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom Delay on Monday launched the latest phase of his extremist makeover on ABC's "Dancing with the Stars." Two years after publishing his book and 18 months after starting the Coalition for a Conservative Majority, Delay turned to the Cha Cha to complete his resurrection. Which is altogether fitting for the man who repeatedly compared himself to Jesus Christ.

Delay's Christ complex first manifested itself in 2001 as he explained to the Washington Post the opposition to his none-too-subtle campaign to bring his fundamentalism to the United States Congress. "People hate the messenger," Delay announced, adding, "That's why they killed Christ." On the day of his booking five years later, Delay told Time he prayed:

"Let people see Christ through me."

As it turns out, the similarities between Jesus and Tom Delay are striking:

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Even as the watered down health care reform legislation from the Senate Finance Committee has landed with a resounding thud, a new study is shining a spotlight on questions the Baucus bill fails to address. Following an analysis from PriceWaterhouseCoopers earlier this year, the survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation confirms American employers are planning to raise health care premiums, slash benefits and, increasingly, drop coverage for their workers.

The Kaiser report is just the latest symptom of the rapidly deteriorating system of employer-provided health insurance coverage. A 2007 report from the Economic Policy Institute showed a dramatic decline in employer-provided health care. That drop-off from 64.2% of Americans covered through workplace insurance in 2000 to just 59.7% in 2006 alone added 2.3 million more people to those without coverage. Census data since showed workplace coverage dipped further in 2007, down to an alarming 59.3%. A recent Thomson Reuters survey put the figure for 2009 at a stunning 54.6%. (Last week's data from the U.S. Census revealed that it was only the expansion of government programs including SCHIP and Medicaid which offset the erosion of employer coverage in 2008.)

As the Washington Post reported Tuesday, the grim outlook for employer-provided health insurance is growing more dismal still:

Forty percent of employers surveyed said they are likely to increase the amount their workers pay out of pocket for doctor visits. Almost as many said they are likely to raise annual deductibles and the amount workers pay for prescription drugs.

Nine percent said they plan to tighten eligibility for health benefits; 8 percent said they plan to drop coverage entirely. Forty-one percent of employers said they were "somewhat" or "very" likely to increase the amount employees pay in premiums -- though that would not necessarily mean employees are paying a higher percentage of the premiums. Employers could simply be passing along the same proportional share of the overall increase that they did in 2009.

To be sure, Americans' health care expenditures are spiraling out of control, expanding at triple the rate of wages.

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