This New York Times article is worth a look.

Reporters Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes trace how the “death panel” rumors that are currently dominating the national debate over health care reform have grown—one might say metastasized—over time, and it names the people responsible for propagating these falsehoods.

As our readers know, at AJN we usually avoid taking sides in partisan political fights. We focus on issues that are important to nurses and their patients, and when we publish articles that concern health care policymaking, we try to present the facts as objectively as possible. […]

“Nurse Ratched” is a blogger who recently took the initiative and got an interview with former Vermont governor Howard Dean about health care reform. It’s great to see nurses who are helping take citizen journalism to the next level. 

And here’s a very sensible, open-minded post at Florence dot com about the health care system in Canada and whether it’s as frightening and awful as it’s made out to be.  (Hint: she thinks it isn’t. And yes, we just mentioned this blogger in our last post. We’ll stop now!)

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

(Read the whole column by Paul Krugman in the NY Times.)

An example of the kind of misinformation that is being spread to scare people about health care reform can be found in the Allnurses.com post quoted below. The altered U.S. flag image to the left (by fletcherwarren, via Flickr) suggests, with perhaps intentional irony, the McCarthy-era fear-mongering about socialism that seems to underlie many such blanket dismissals of health care reform. What do you think? And where are people getting such information?

. . . I just want to know If Im the only person who is considering not doing nursing if the gov’t goes through with universal health care. I was talking to my manager about this tonight at work and he was saying that Im probably not going to want to do nursing since nurses will make $9 or $10 an hour. I know nursing isnt about money, but that kind of money isnt worth going into nursing. You cant even live off that amount of money! Nurses now say they dont get paid enough for how hard they work and how much they have to put up with. Am I the only thats thinking like this?

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