10:25am August 19, 2009
By Scott Hensley
We may have a new benchmark for raucousness at congressional town hall meetings.
Rep. Barney Frank, the loquacious Massachusetts Democrat, faced a very tough crowd at a senior center in the coastal town of Dartmouth Tuesday.
A flash point came when some in the crowd compared President Obama's plans for health overhaul to something from the Nazi era, complete with posters showing President Obama with a Hitler-style mustache.
"On what planet do you spend most of your time?" Frank asked a woman, who wanted Frank to explain his support for what she called a Nazi policy, the Associated Press reported. "Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it."
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I listened to the excerpt, and the woman said:
"They say that we need to limit medicare expenditures ... in order to reduce the deficit. ... This is the policy of a Hitler policy in 1939 where he said : 'Certain lives are not worth living, certain people we should not spend the money to keep them alive.' Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy as Obama has expressly supported this policy."
I cleaned this up, omitting the kinds of repetitious statements that occur during verbal speech.
Her statement is either dumb (if she actually believes it) or a disgusting and dishonest attempt to manipulate public opinion.
It assumes that the only way to limit medicare expenditures is to deny effective care to people who need it. There are other ways. Eg., they already have a program to ferret out fraud in medical treatment, like billing for treatment that wasn't performed.
What is especially disgusting is that the medical insurance industry which comes up with this propaganda, is itself denying care to people by canceling policies when people actually need them.
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