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I see Betsy McCaughey crawled out from her little rock to dish with Neil Cavuto over the Obama administration's latest attempt to create jobs, this time in the health care sector. I wonder whose payroll she's on these days. Her argument, however, is a little bizarre. Republicans have argued for a long time that the Affordable Care Act will mean people won't have access to care because there will be so many of us that health professionals will be overwhelmed. A rational person might think the answer to that is to assist in the training and education of more health professionals in order to meet the rising demand, right? And so it goes, that McCaughey proves once again that there are no rational Republicans.

MCCAUGHEY: Well, this agenda is spending money to spread the wealth and buy votes. If you look at the economy, the health care sector has been producing jobs, even while the rest of the economy is staggering.

So the White House doesn't have to spend money to produce health care jobs. The purpose of these jobs, and it was very clear as the law was written, was quite different. It's to spread the money around. They're cutting what doctors are paid under Medicare, cutting the care available to seniors under Medicare and at the same time they're handing out grants to “community organizations.” They are creating jobs called promotories to people who are well known in the community to sign people up for health plans...

Huh? That last little gem was classic McCaughey, right down to the gobbledegookish last word. Here's what the White House announcement today was about, right out of the horse's mouth:

Up to $1 billion dollars will be awarded to innovative projects across the country that test creative ways to deliver high quality medical care and save money. Launched today by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Health Care Innovation Challenge will also give preference to projects that rapidly hire, train and deploy health care workers.

“We’ve taken incredible steps to reduce health care costs and improve care, but we can’t wait to do more,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Both public and private community organizations around the country are finding innovative solutions to improve our health care system and the Health Care Innovation Challenge will help jump start these efforts.”

Funded by the Affordable Care Act, the Health Care Innovation Challenge will award grants in March to applicants who will implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, particularly those with the highest health care needs. The Challenge will support projects that can begin within six months. Additionally, projects that focus on rapid workforce development will be given priority when grants are awarded.
[...]

Awards will be expected to range from approximately $1 million to $30 million over three years. Applications are open to providers, payers, local government, community-based organizations and particularly to public-private partnerships and multi-payer approaches. Each grantee project will be evaluated and monitored for measurable improvements in quality of care and savings generated.

Please, can someone tell me where in that announcement it says anything about "promotories...to sign people up for health care plans"? I'm having some difficulty finding it, but then, this is Betsy, and like her pals Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, she says whatever comes out of her stupid little mouth and says it with such authority that she actually sounds like she knows what's she's talking about. And when it comes to health care reform, she's done it for so long she's actually created her own special language, it seems.

But wait, there's more.

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Evidently fed up with Republican stalling on the appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick as director of CMS, the Obama administration announced its intention to use a recess appointment to bypass the roadblock.

From the White House blog:

But with the agency facing new responsibilities to protect seniors’ care under the Affordable Care Act, there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing. That’s why tomorrow the President will use a recess appointment to put Dr. Berwick at the agency’s helm and provide strong leadership for the Medicare program without delay.

Cue Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Betsy McCaughey, who will step forward to say the "death panels" will now become reality. It just drives conservatives crazy to see their worst nightmare -- health care reform -- come to pass, even as opposition to it drops away.

Ezra Klein also points out the foolishness of Republican obstruction with regard to Berwick:

But conservatives are making a serious mistake by forcing the administration to rely on a recess appointment for Berwick. Ultimately, what weakens Berwick weakens them, as Berwick, whether they know it or not, is one of the best friends they could have in the administration. That's because insofar as Berwick is a radical, he's a radical in favor of a patient-centered health-care system -- a position that has traditionally been associated with conservatives, not liberals.

This has escaped notice because political activists don't pay much attention to questions of delivery-system reform. Of the three legs that balance the health-care reform stool -- cost, access and quality -- cost and access have traditionally been at the forefront of the issue, and are both politically polarized topics. Quality, however, is a demilitarized zone: Conservatives aren't for high rates of post-operative infections, and neither are liberals.

Whiskey Fire: The WaPo is running a contest to find America's next great pundit! Like Charles Krauthammer? More here and here (h/t Batocchio)

The New Republic: The never-ending lunacy of Betsy McCaughey

Oliver Willis: Wild West gun policy doesn't work

They gave us a republic: Nightowl Newswrap

The Rude Pundit: Photos and quotes that only confirm that atheism equals sanity

alicublog: Film threat

You remember Betsy McCaughey, don't you? She's the right wing hack who propagated a purposely misleading article in The New Republic that was used to torpedo the Clinton health plan, and more recently the author of the "death panels" lie.

Well, Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson has a hell of a scoop in their Oct. 1 issue in an article called "The Lie Machine: The Plot to Kill Health Care Reform":

McCaughey's lies were later debunked in a 1995 post-mortem in The Atlantic, and The New Republic recanted the piece in 2006. But what 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." The memo, prepared by a Phillip Morris executive, mentions only one author by name:

"Worked off-the-record with Manhattan [Editor's note: At the time, McCaughey was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute] and writer Betsy McCaughey as part of the input to the three-part expose in The New Republic on what the Clinton plan means to you. The first part detailed specifics of the plan."

McCaughey did not respond to Rolling Stone's request for an interview.

Via my friend Julia, a New York politics junkie if ever there was one, this interesting background on Betsey McCaughey, who got smacked down on Jon Stewart the other night:

Most of you probably know that we, as a nation, were gifted Ms. McCaughey by Martin Peretz of the New Republic when they published a piece she wrote on the Clinton healthcare reform package which was mined for talking points by the press and the Republicans (the New Republic has since both debunked and apologized for the shoddiness and dishonesty of her work). She was then asked to join George Pataki as his Lieutenant Governor in his successful campaign against Mario Cuomo.

What you may not know about Ms. McCaughey: when she was replaced on the ballot in the next election by another candidate for Lite Gov,* she left the Republican party to run for Governor on the Democratic and Liberal lines. That wasn't the reason she gave, though. The reason she gave was much more interesting (emphasis mine)She complained that she was forced to turn to Democrats in the Legislature when Republicans rebuffed her efforts to expand pre-kindergarten programs in the state and to restrict the ability of health maintenance organizations to refuse to pay for experimental cancer treatments.'''It showed me which party puts patients ahead of politics and campaign contributions,'' she said. ''It's the Democratic Party.''so it wasn't really that the Republicans kicked her to the curb. She just couldn't live with their unprincipled opposition to government healthcare mandates.

As a not-Republican in the Democratic primaries, the then-Betsy Ross (yeah, I know, I always enjoyed that myself) had a number of positions which might surprise you. She was a crusader for unrestricted late-term abortion, a fan of gay rights and increased welfare spending, and someone who said she'd grown up and changed her mind about her opposition to the Clinton plan.

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Following this abysmal appearance on The Daily Show, it appears that Elizabeth McCaughey has decided to cut and run from her position at a large medical company.

Betsy McCaughey — an outspoken proponent of the myth that Democrats’ health care reform proposals will lead to the creation of “death panels,” as well as a former lieutenant governor of New York and adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute — has stepped down from her position as a director of Cantel Medical Corp., which bills itself as a “leading provider of infection prevention and control products in the healthcare market.”

From a press release:

CANTEL MEDICAL CORP. (NYSE: CMN – News) announced that on August 20, 2009 it received a letter of resignation from Ms. Elizabeth McCaughey as a director of the Company. Ms. McCaughey, who had served as a director since 2005, stated that she was resigning to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest during the national debate over healthcare reform. Read on...

At this time it isn't known if McCaughey resigned voluntarily or if she was asked to step down, but one thing is for sure -- her credibility on any issue regarding health care, or reform of the industry has been destroyed. Oh well, at least she'll have more time to spend with her family!