By GottaLaff
Via Think Progress:
On ABC’s This Week today, former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich claimed that most government-run health systems are disasters. He said that the Veterans Health Administration is “the one system that actually works reasonably well,” and dismissed Medicare as “basically a private system with a government funding.” [...]Just keep pushing those lies, Rushpublics. If you repeat them enough, America will believe you. Here's an idea: We swat them down enough, and this time America will believe us.
Medicare is a government-run program. [...]Later in the segment, host George Stephanopoulos had to personally call Gingrich out on one of his falsehoods. Last week, Sarah Palin said that the Obama administration was advocating “death panels” that would determine whether a person was “worthy of health care.” Gingrich tried to lend that myth credence by bringing up the writings of “Dr. Zeke Emanuel, who’s the chief adviser to the president and brother of the chief of staff.”
First, as Stephanopoulos pointed out, Emanuel is “not the chief health care adviser.” Second, Emanuel’s comments on end-of-life issues were part of “academic discussions of theoretical constructs” — not expressions of his personal beliefs on the current health care debate. Stephanopoulos noted that Emanuel had “written three articles between 1996 and 2008 that include some of those phrases.” “Those phrases appear nowhere in the bill,” he added.
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