This morning, I received this email from Mitch Stewart, Executive Director of Organizing for America, a "community organizing project" funded by the Democratic National Committee and taxpayers.  Founded just after the inauguration of Barack Obama, the group seeks to mobilize Obama supporters to elect other political candidates and support Obama's legislative agenda.  The group has access to the contact information of 14 million Americans who identified themselves as Obama supporters during the 2008 Presidential Election.

Beckwith --

It feels like a new lie about health insurance reform crops up each day. Government taking over all health care?  Not true.  Euthanasia for seniors?  Couldn't be more false.  Rationing of care?  Reform will stop rationing, not increase it.

These lies create fear and anger, and we're seeing the results around the country.  Frightened crowds have flooded town halls, and the office of a Georgia representative was defaced with a swastika.

It's time to set the record straight -- and, more importantly, expose the special interests and partisan attack organizations behind the lies and misinformation.

That's why we created our new "Setting the Record Straight" site. Check out the site today and then spread the word to your friends.

As the site makes clear, these lies are no accident.  They're part of a deliberate plot by the special interests who profit from the status quo to kill any reform at all.  While Americans watch their paychecks dwindle, their coverage disappear, and their businesses struggle, special interests are trying to scare folks into opposing reform.

Our "Setting the Record Straight" site has all the info you need to fight back, as well as easy ways to get involved in the fight for health insurance reform.  We'll be updating it often with new information debunking health care lies, so stop by regularly.

As we learned during the campaign, lies like these can spread like wildfire through viral emails and from friend to friend.  The best way to stop them is to arm yourself with the facts -- and make sure your friends and family know the truth.

Check out the site, and share it with everyone you know:  http://my.barackobama.com/record

Thanks,

Mitch

Hey Mitch, you lying sack of puss -- who's creating lies, fear and anger here?  Well, it's you and the rest of the Obama team, of course.  Your bunch will stop at nothing to jam ObamaCare down the throats of Americans who are overwhelmingly against it.

Obama, himself, said America must make drastic cuts in health spending.  The size of his proposed cuts varies from speech to speech, but the figure cited most often by Obama's advisers is 30 percent per year -- up to $700 billion annually.  A 30-percent annual cut is going to take a big bite out of somebody's health care.  The only question is whose.

The numbers make clear that most of these cuts will have to come at the expense of those who need health care the most -- the elderly, the disabled and the gravely ill.  Obama himself said, "Older, sicker societies pay more on health care than younger, healthier ones," Obama told the AMA.

He is right. According to a 2006 study by the Department of Health and Human Services, five percent of the U.S. population accounts for nearly 50 percent of health care spending in America.  Who are those five percent?  Most are people over 65 years of age with serious, chronic illnesses.   By contrast, the study notes, half of the U.S. population "spends little or nothing on health care… with annual medical spending below $664 per person."  These, of course, are mostly healthy young people -- people without serious, chronic illnesses.

Obviously, Obama will not meet his cost-cutting targets by reducing care to healthy young people.  They are already spending next to nothing. It's the old, the dying and the chronically ill whose health care he will cut.  The numbers make this clear.

At present, the main vehicle of ObamaCare is the so-called America's Affordable Health Choices Act, introduced on June 9.  This law will force Americans to enroll in "qualified" health plans -- that is, plans approved and controlled by the government.  Americans will be invited to "choose" between "public" and "private" insurance plans, but will find little difference between them.  "Public" or "private," they will all follow the same rules, dictated by the Department of Health and Human Services -- the same agency, incidentally, which issued the report, titled "The High Concentration of U.S. Health Care Expenditures, 2006."

How will Obama cut costs?  His June 13 radio speech gave some hints.  Obama said his plan would provide "incentives" to doctors to "avoid unnecessary hospital stays, treatments and tests that drive up costs."

And what sort of treatment does Obama consider "unnecessary?"  In an ABC News special June 24, he implied medical treatment might be wasted on elderly people with grave illnesses, citing his own grandmother as an example.

Dying of cancer, with less than a year to live, Obama's grandmother broke her hip. "[T]he question was, does she get hip replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?" asked the president.  "Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller," Obama concluded.

For 20 years, health care reformers from Edward Kennedy to Hillary Clinton have praised the government-run health systems of Europe and Canada.  Obama and his team have taken up the same cry, and a June 1st report from Obama's Council of Economic Advisers praised European health care and urged Americans to emulate it.

Health care in Europe stinks.  So why did Obama's economic advisers commend it?  Simple.  It's cheaper.

 
Titled "The Economic Case for Health Care Reform," the report noted that six countries -- Canada, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Britain and France -- spend only 9.6 percent of their Gross Domestic Product on health care, while America spends 15.3 percent.  It recommended bringing our health spending down to European levels through "efficiency improvements in the U.S. healthcare system."

This is the dirty secret behind the movement for universal health care.  Its true purpose is to cut medical care, not increase it.  Every plan put forth by health care "reformers" in the last 20 years features drastic cuts -- not increases -- in health spending. During her 2008 presidential run, for example, Hillary Clinton vowed to slash medical spending in America by $120 billion per year. Obama says he will cut even more.  With "the right kind of cost-effectiveness," Obama's chief economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers told MSNBC's "Meet the Press" on April 19, "we could take as much as $700 billion a year out of our health care system."

Current annual health spending in America is about $2.5 trillion, so Obama and his team are talking about a 30-percent cut.  It happens that the Health Care Financing Administration, or HCFA, reports that 27-30 percent of annual Medicare spending goes to end-of-life care for the elderly -- specifically, health care during the last year of life.

These figures suggest Obama could meet his target of a 30-percent cut simply by denying treatment to the sickest and feeblest of America's elderly -- those with a life expectancy of one year or less.

Obama's special adviser for health policy, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, appears to have something like that in mind.

In a January 31, 2009, article in the British medical journal Lancet, Emanuel advised steering health dollars toward the young and fit; specifically those between the ages of 15 and 40, while reducing health spending for the elderly.  Weirdly, Emanuel -- along with his co-authors Govind Persad and Alan Wertheimer -- made a special point of arguing that age-weighted medical rationing does not violate the rules of political correctness.  They wrote:  "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination…  Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.  Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not."

In other words, to put it crudely, deciding to let the elderly die because we think of them in "stereotypical" terms -- say, as useless old dodderers -- would be "ageism."  However, letting them die for a "good" reason -- for example, because they have already had their chance at life, and now it's time to give someone else a chance -- is perfectly OK.

In Emanuel's view, letting old people die is not the problem. The problem is finding the right words to justify it.

The state-run Oregon Health Plan works very much as Obama says ObamaCare will work.

Barbara Wagner of Springfield, Ore., was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005.  Chemotherapy and radiation put her cancer into remission.  But the cancer returned in May 2008.  Wagner's doctor prescribed Tarceva, a pill which slows cancer growth. There was a good chance it might extend her life by a few weeks or even months.  At age 64, Wagner had two sons, three daughters, 15 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.  Every moment she could spend with her loved ones was precious.

But Oregon's health commissars nixed the plan.  Her Tarceva treatment would cost $4,000 per month.  Wagner was going to die anyway, so why waste the money?  Wagner received a letter stating that the Oregon Health Plan would not approve any treatment for her "that is meant to prolong life, or change the course of the disease…"  However, if Wagner opted for physician-assisted suicide, Oregon would be happy to pick up the tab, said the letter.

Physician-assisted suicide is legal in Oregon and costs only about $50.

"It was horrible," Wagner told reporters.  "To say to someone, we'll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it's cruel.  Who do they think they are?"

But Mitch Stewart wants you all to believe these facts are all "just lies."  Obama and the Obots lie so often that they have come to believe that lies are truths and truths are lies.  It's really weird?