Over the past few weeks, misinformation circulating about Obama’s health-reform bill has gone from mildly plausible to downright demented. The myths are so pervasive that even the White House is worried. They've set up a Web site to counter some of them. “What we learned in the campaign is that in today’s world, where what qualifies as news is often something that you’ve heard from your neighbor who got it from another friend who is sure that they got it from an authority, you have to take that seriously,” Linda Douglass, communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, told the Gaggle last week.
There’s a discernible pattern to the emergence of health-care misinformation. The more startling claims often surface on conservative blogs like Hot Air or in Investors Business Daily editorials. They “go viral” being e-mailed through activist networks, referenced on respectable blogs like The National Review’s Corner or linked through news aggregators. Sometimes conservative think tanks will lend legitimacy to the claim (although rarely will they support it fully). Soon enough, the lie is repeated by Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck and is being discussed by bemused mainstream commentators, while Democratic operatives scramble to refute it.
Here at NEWSWEEK, we’ve heard our share of crazy myths. Here are some of the truly loopy ones:
- Doctors will be imprisoned if they provide life-saving treatments not sanctioned by the government
- Private insurance will be outlawed
- Obama wants to revive a Nazi program of killing incurably or mentally ill people
- Medicare will be ended
- The bill allows the government to access your bank account
Perhaps it's the insanity of these myths that has led to an outbreak of unseemly "town hall face." Whatever the upshot, we're hoping to catalog and marvel at the absurdity of it all. So we want to know what you’re hearing. What crazy myths are ending up in your inbox? Have you heard anything nutty from your relatives or friends? Let us know in the comments.
