Two Congressional GOP leaders admit lying to defeat health care

The Congressional Republicans, who themselves offer no solution to the many problems Americans have with no health care coverage, have inadequate coverage, or think they have coverage only to find it suddenly withdrawn when they make a claim, have now admitted they were lying earlier when they described alleged problems in the current health care proposals. The first of these Republicans is GOP Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Rep. Blunt, the head of the House GOP Health Care Solutions Group, was caught lying by his local newspaper.

Blunt claimed to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he wouldn’t be able to get his hip replaced in countries with socialized medicine, prompting the paper to respond aggressively in an editorial:

Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Springfield, knows a thing or two about health care. But some of what he knows just isn’t true.

“I’m 59,” Mr. Blunt said last week during a meeting with Post-Dispatch reporters and editors. “In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn’t get it replaced.”

We fact-checked that. At least 63 percent of hip replacements performed in Canada last year and two-thirds of those done in England were on patients age 65 or older. More than 1,200 in Canada were done on people older than 85.

In a subsequent conversation with the paper, Blunt claimed: “I’m glad you pointed that out to me. I won’t use that example any more.”

The second GOP leader who has admitted lying to defeat health care reform is Sen. Charles Grassley, R - Iowa). Last week Sen. Grassley told an audience of his constituents that "The government would pull the plug on 'Gramdma.'"Here is Plumline's report on his lie.

This passed unnoticed, but it’s a big deal: Over the weekend, and very quietly, Senator Chuck Grassley completely retracted his widely-reported claim last week that people have “every reason to fear” that the House health care proposal would create a “government program that determines if you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”

The retraction was buried deep in this Washington Post article on Grassley’s role, with a spokesperson admitting Grassley doesn’t really believe what he said about “grandma”:

Grassley says he opposes that counseling as written in the House version of the bill, but a spokesman said the senator does not think the House provision would in fact give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die. The House bill allows patients to decide for themselves if they would like such counseling.

Let’s be clear: By clarifying that Grassley doesn’t think the House bill would “give the government such authority in deciding when and how people die,” his spokesperson completely repudiated his widely discussed claim. This goes much farther than Grassley did in a statement released Friday clarifying he’d never used the words “death panel” and was merely worried about “unintended consequences.”

So, either Grassley made his claim about “grandma” to a crowd in his home state last week and didn’t believe it; or he changed his mind since then.

This demonstrates the position of the Republican Party very clearly. They have no interest is working to resolve problems that the American people have with the availability or effectiveness of health care. They have no policy or proposals to fix the many flaws in the current lack-of-system. They work for the health insurance industry that is gouging the American public for their own profits, and the Republicans work to gain personal power in the government at the expense of the American people. This isn't just some rogue Senator or Congressman. This is lies told by the Republican leadership to spread fear of the proposed changes in the health care system. That fear will kill people if it succeeds.

The Republican leadership has no hesitation to repeatedly tell lies to advance their self-centered cause, and no shame when caught at it.