Health Care Reform: The Assault on Truth

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

Now it’s getting down and dirty. As expected, the gloves are off in President Obama’s push for health care reform. Democrats and Republicans are battling over how to fix a system they all agree is broken—that’s how Congress is supposed to work. But this summer something new has entered the political arena—a tsunami of rumors, myths, fear-mongering and misinformation about the proposals that surges around the Internet in nanoseconds. “I’m totally confused about what’s going on,” one reader wrote to the AARP Bulletin. “How do I know who to believe?”

Misinformation spreads at rapid speed

It’s a good question. Another is how this new phenomenon—the ability to spread misleading information at rapid speed through chain e-mails, blogs, text-messaging and “tweets”—will affect the reform debate.

“What we’re seeing is a flood of viral content that distorts the Obama effort to reform health care,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who codirects www.FactCheck.org, a website that examines questionable claims from all sides of the political spectrum.

Today’s opposition tools are very different from those used against previous attempts at health care reform in the Clinton era. Then, the key means of attack available were television advertising and direct-mail campaigns, which were expensive and took time to organize.

“Extremists and people who are so locked into their own ideology that they’ll distort anything have been out there forever,” Jamieson says. “But they haven’t had a way to reach out to as many people as efficiently as they have now.”

Understanding the proposals

Health care reform has “serious consequences to people’s lives, and it would be useful if as many people as possible actually understood what the proposals are about,” Jamieson says. But the rise of the Internet and the decline of the mainstream press as a prime source of information, she adds, put that prospect at risk.

To add to the confusion, Obama, while talking up his overall goals for reform, has left it to Congress to work out the details. The result: a number of committees, each developing and announcing scores of proposals, which change as negotiations progress. “This process has not been a success in garnering public support for reform, and has left people nervous,” says Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. “So the headlines every day, because the bills are different, scare different people.”

Could the rumormongering affect the outcome? Recent angry exchanges and violent interruptions at lawmakers’ town hall meetings during the August recess suggest that it might. Members of Congress faced a barrage of questions based on the same Internet-spread myths.

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