A New Low in the Healthcare "Debate"

Iain and I saw this bullshit ad like nine million times this weekend:

Voiceover by someone who sounds to be an elderly white male: Seniors have sacrificed, surviving the Great Depression, landing at Normandy on D-Day, raising strong families, and protecting our freedom in a dangerous world. Now, in their most vulnerable period, seniors are being asked to sacrifice again. Congress plans to pay for healthcare reform by cutting five hundred billion dollars from Medicare. For seniors, this will mean long waits for care, cuts to MRIs, CAT scans, and other vital tests. Seniors may lose their own doctors. The government, not doctors, will decide if older patients are worth the cost. And the cruel joke here is that many of our politicians are designing a healthcare plan for the country that they don't want to apply to themselves—so Congress could get better healthcare than the rest of us. Tell Congress: Don't pay for healthcare reform on the backs of our seniors. They've sacrificed enough.

Suffice it to say, the (mis)information in the ad is easily debunked bullshit, the actual facts about which can be found at FactCheck.org, e.g. here, here, here, here, here, here, etc. SouceWatch.org, meanwhile, reports that the allegedly non-partisan 60 Plus Association, who put out the ad, is a front group for the pharmaceutical industry, with ties to Republican direct mail guru Richard Viguerie, founder of Conservative Digest magazine.

Everything about this ad is bullshit, starting with the math (people who are merely "60+" didn't live through the Depression and fight WWII, so they're grouping two distinct generational cohorts into one) and suggesting that Congress could get better healthcare than the rest of us, as if they don't already get better healthcare than most of the country—something that the members of Congress actively trying to reform healthcare have been pointing out as an injustice for my entire adult life. Now conservatives are trying to complain that's a possibility? Zuh? Does not compute. Such mendacious horseshit.

And, aside from everything else, this despicable bit of fear-mongering, featuring almost nothing but white people (except, of course, for the black orderly pushing a nice white lady in her wheelchair), is one of the most racist political ads I've ever seen. That black president is going to take away good white people's hard-earned healthcare for welfare queens and illegals! It's absolutely disgusting.