Euthanasia, evil and 'making things up'

by Mark Silva

The doctor is in:

Howard Dean, former Democratic National Committee chairman, onetime candidate for his party's presidential nomination, former governor of Vermont - and a physician -- says there is nothing to Republican Sarah Palin's warning of "death panels'' in the party's healthcare reforms.

"Euthanasia's not in this bill,'' Dean said with some certainty in an interview with CNN this morning.

And Dean, rebutting the notion that government bureaucrats will be getting between patients and physicians under the program that President Barack Obama is promoting, says that in all his years as a physician no one in the government ever told him what he could do with a patient under Medicare - but insurance companies have been getting in the way for years.

"never once did I have a Medicare bureaucrat tell me what I could or couldn't do for a patient, but all the time we have aucrats from the insurance companies calling up and saying,'' Dean said in an appearance on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos. ""We're not going to cover this, and we're not going to pay for that, and we're denying coverage of that.

"The system we have right now is broken. We need to fix it., I think, giving the American people some choices about how to fix it makes sense.''

Palin, who has accused the media of "making things up,'' is the one who made up things this time, with a Facebook posting criticizing the president's healthcare plans as "downright evil,'' Dean suggested. "About euthanasia, they're just totally erroneous. She just made that up," he said. "Just like the 'Bridge to Nowhere' that she supposedly didn't support. There's nothing like euthanasia in the bill.''

STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): Good morning, and welcome to "This Week."

Health care town halls gone wild.

(UNKNOWN): I don't want the government to do it for me!

STEPHANOPOULOS: Passionate questions.

(UNKNOWN): I want to know if it's coming out of my paycheck.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Raucous crowds. Both sides dig in.

(UNKNOWN): Health care now!

STEPHANOPOULOS: This morning, the debate sweeping the country with

our exclusive headliners, Newt Gingrich...

GINGRICH: I don't want the government to try to run things.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... and Howard Dean.

DEAN: If you're not going to have a public option, don't pretend

you're doing health care reform.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Gingrich and Dean, face to face, a "This Week" debate.

Then...

CLINTON: The pictures were worth a million words.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... Bill Clinton's mission.

CLINTON: I'm not a policymaker.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is the breakthrough with North Korea another

comeback for him? That and the rest of the week's politics on a special

expanded roundtable with Council on Foreign Relations President Richard

Haas, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Matthew Dowd, and Peggy Noonan of

the Wall Street Journal.

And, as always, the Sunday funnies.

CRAIG FERGUSON, TALK SHOW HOST: After the journalists landed, Al

Gore gave a speech. Now, I don't want to say that Al went on too long,

but about half way through the speech, the women are like, "We can go

back to prison if you want."

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: From the heart of the nation's capital, "This Week" with

ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos, live from

the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hello again. Health care may be the most personal

issue Washington confronts, and this week there was plenty of evidence

to back that up.

Town halls on health care went viral. Members of Congress

everywhere got tough questions. Some got shouted down. As the rhetoric

heated up, we even heard Nazi Germany invoked.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: You be the

judge. They're carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town

meeting on health care.

LIMBAUGH: There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and

Adolf Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to

protest a Hitler-like policy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: And with that, let's have our own debate with two

men at the center of the conversation, former House Speaker Newt

Gingrich and former Vermont Governor and DNC Chair Howard Dean, also the

author of a new book, "Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Health Care

Reform."

And, Mr. Speaker, let me begin with you. I wonder, are you

comfortable with the tone of these town meetings? As you know,

Democrats have said that a lot of this grassroots activity is

manufactured AstroTurf, and they say the goal is to shut down

conversation, not encourage it.

GINGRICH: You know, I -- I spent 20 years doing town hall

meetings. I once had 800 machinist members on an Eastern strike for

three hours, and they got to shout all they wanted.

I thought Senator Tom Harkin was the model this week. His staff got

nervous. They wanted to close down the meeting. And Harkin said, no,

these are Americans. They have every right to talk. And he just

listened, and he engaged, and he conversed.

People are very, very upset. They're upset because the stimulus was

passed unread. They're upset because, at 3 o'clock in the morning,

Pelosi introduced a 300-page amendment for an energy tax increase and

voted on it at 4 the next afternoon. They have this sense of a thing --

of a machine running over them.

And so there's -- there's a substantial number of people who are

genuinely upset. The American way is let it hang out, talk to them.

Members ought to go back home, hold as many town hall meetings as you

have to, let people get it out of their system. And by September, we

could have a genuine dialogue in this country.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And I know your allies, Governor Dean, have been --

have been saying that this is just all, you know, paid for, people

recruited by lobbyists here in Washington, but you can't create -- you

can't force people to go out to a town meeting. You can't manufacture

that kind of anger, can you?

DEAN: Well, there actually is a lot -- there is a lot of

orchestration. There's the Brian MacGuffie memo, which actually tells

people to do -- do what they're doing, which is sit in the front, jump

up and interrupt. You know, one -- one thing...

STEPHANOPOULOS: He's got like 23 friends on Facebook, though.

DEAN: Well, yes, but he's also -- there's a lot of other

organizations, including some pretty reputable companies, who are --

formerly reputable companies that are financing all this stuff.

Look, I'm with the speaker on this. I think you want to have

dialogue. I think shouting people down doesn't create dialogue, and

it's not really -- not really dialogue.

But, you know, the true thing is, you know, I disagree with the

speaker. You've got the spectacle of Republican congresspeople running

around handing out stimulus checks which they voted against the

stimulus. The stimulus has done good things.

It's cut -- CBO estimates that it's cut the reduction in the GNP by

at least 1 percent -- that's a significant number -- and that the

stimulus is going to do better things.

So I disagree. I don't -- I think this is a handful of angry people

who've been angry for a long time. Don't forget: The Republican

playbook for a long time was get people angry. They succeeded. There

are still a lot of angry people. I think they're out -- vastly

outnumbered by the people who really want something done about health

care reform.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you disagree -- you disagree on the stimulus,

but you -- and you also disagree on health care with this whole idea of

whether or not to have a public health insurance option in the bill.

And, Governor Dean, you've said that health reform is not worth having...

DEAN: Right.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... without this. And your organization is

actually running ads against Democrats who don't support the public...

DEAN: That's not -- that's not my organization.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Democrats -- you found it. You were a founder.

DEAN: I founded it. I don't run it anymore. I do some consulting

work for them.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me get to the ads then, because one of the

Democrats you went after was Ben Nelson.

DEAN: I did not go after him, just to correct you.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Democracy -- Democracy for America went after him.

DEAN: And I've talked to Ben since that, just so...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: OK. Well, let's see the ad.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(UNKNOWN): Now I hear that Ben Nelson, the senator that I voted

for, is leading the charge to delay health reform this summer. That's

exactly what they want. The health and insurance companies that have

given Senator Nelson over $2 million know that, if they can stall

reform, they can kill it. I have to ask: Senator, whose side are you on?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to hear about you talking to -- to Senator

Nelson, because, as you know, the White House has been pretty angry

about these ads. President Obama says it's counterproductive, yet your

allies are not stopping.

DEAN: There are a lot of people who are very upset about the

incredible reach that the insurance company has. Look, this bill -- the

CBO scores it at $60 billion a year on the House side. I think putting

$60 billion a year into the health insurance industry is insane. I

really do.

And so you want a public option. Look, we've -- what the president

wants to do is very straightforward. Sixty -- or roughly sixty -- fifty

or sixty million Americans have what Newt has called socialized medicine

or government-run health care. They're over -- over 65. They're

Medicare. That's what Medicare is.

Now, what Obama is essentially saying is, "Let's give the choice of

getting into a system like that or staying with what they have to the

American people."

So if you're voting against having a public option, what you're

voting against is something that 72 percent of Americans in two polls

want, which is the choice. Most of them aren't going to sign up for the

public option, but they think they have the choice.

Why shouldn't they have the choice? Why should the health insurance

companies have that choice?

STEPHANOPOULOS: What's the answer to that question?

GINGRICH: Well, first of all, the government option we're talking

about -- let's look at where government runs the health system

entirely. The Indian Health Service is a disaster. Medicaid is so

corrupt and run so badly -- we just published a book at the Center for

Health Transformation called "Stop Paying the Crooks," because our

estimate is that government fraud between Medicare and Medicaid is

between $70 billion and $120 billion a year.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Veterans care works pretty well.

GINGRICH: Veterans care is the one system that actually works

reasonably well. But the others do not. I mean, Medicare is basically

a private system with a government funding.

An amendment was offered in every committee to have the -- to have

the members of Congress and their staff in any government option as a

mandate. And if this is good enough for the American people, it's good

enough for the politicians. In every committee, the Democrats voted

no. Now, why is it they want to insist on a government-run system for

-- for people other than the Congress, but the Congress and their staff

would be exempt?

Second, it's not -- it's just, I think intellectually not honest to

suggest that this is going to be a matter of choice. The way the bill

in the House -- and we're talking about a specific bill -- the way the

bill in the House would work, if your company didn't offer any

insurance, they would pay an 8 percent tax on their personnel cost.

For most companies, that would be a net savings of 3 percent, 4

percent or 5 percent. One estimate by Lewin Associates (sic) is 131

million Americans will lose their private insurance and be pushed into a

government plan.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Dean, those arguments seem to have taken

hold, at least in the Senate, where even Democrats say you're not...

DEAN: Look, let's be fair. Lewin Associates is owned by a health

insurance company. So let's -- let's -- let's -- the CBO, which I think

is a more reasonable organization, says 5 million or 10 million people

are going to end up there.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Depends on the amount of subsidy...

(CROSSTALK)

DEAN: Second of all, what the speaker didn't tell you is, let's

just suppose you get forced out of your employer-based system, which I

think is unlikely, but let's suppose that you do. You've got a choice.

The government will pay your subsidy to either go into -- based on your

income, either to go into the public option or a private option. Nobody

is forcing you in to the public option.

Now, a third thing is that nobody talks about is this bill is

terrific for small business, and the Blue Dogs made it a better bill,

and I hope (inaudible) gets through, it gets even better.

Right now in the House bill, if you have a payroll, if you're a

small business with a payroll of less than $500,000, you have no

responsibility whatsoever to give your employees health insurance. That

now becomes a subsidy based on your income, and then you can choose

either a private or a public sector.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's...

DEAN: This is -- this is choice. This is real choice.

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's in the House bills, but the Senate has made

it pretty clear they're not going to include this public health

insurance option, at least as contemplated in the House bill. The most

they're going to get is co-ops...

(CROSSTALK)

DEAN: No, actually, the Senate Finance -- this has already passed

four out of the five committees. The Senate Finance Committee has said

that, not the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, but you need 60 votes to get it through.

DEAN: We need 51 votes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you're saying...

(CROSSTALK)

GINGRICH: But if you want to see why the -- why a substantial

number of Americans are very frightened, that's a good example. The

Senate rules on passing reconciliation were clearly designed for budget

items.

If we're now going to try to rewrite 17 percent of the economy, life

and death for every American, by pretending that massive health reform

is a reconciliation item and ramming it through with 51 votes, first of

all, I don't think -- I think a lot of Senate Democrats (inaudible) I

think the idea of stripping the Senate of its ability as a Senate to

operate with some sense of discretion and ramming through something on

this size will go down very badly with many senators, will go down very

badly with much of the country.

But I -- I talked to Senator Grassley as -- as late as yesterday,

and he made quite clear that he believes there will be no government

plan and there will be no rationing in any bill that the Senate passes

and that he would certainly not in any way support that. And I think

Grassley's very key to Republicans.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me follow up. Senator Baucus, the Democratic

chair of the Finance Committee, seems to agree on that, and he's

produced a draft that gets to 95 percent coverage, 94 percent, 95

percent coverage without a public option. Why wouldn't that be good enough?

DEAN: Let me just say, A, there's no rationing in any of these

bills, so we don't have to worry about that. Secondly, 95 percent

coverage is good. That's terrific. The problem is, you can't afford it

unless you have a public option. There's no cost control on that. Again...

STEPHANOPOULOS: He says it would come in under $1 trillion.

DEAN: Well, the House is at $60 billion a year, and the Senate

would be at $100 billion a year. I don't think -- look, here's the

problem with -- this is why I think the public option is so important.

The fundamental problem is that Medicare has gone up around 2 percent

over the rate of inflation. That's bad. But the health care -- the

private sector has gone up at two-and-a-half times the rate of inflation

for 30 years.

Our economy is uncompetitive because we have an employer-based

health care system. Now, I'm not advocating getting rid of an

employer-based health care system, because a lot of employers like it

and people in it like it. But I am advocating giving people the same

choice that Congress has.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to get to -- really quickly, because I want

to get to another issue here...

GINGRICH: Well, I just want to say, this is one of the great

tragedies of how we've approached this, this year. Cost control doesn't

work. I had a major hospital tell me last week they would literally go

bankrupt under the House plan, because if you apply the kind of cost

control without real health reform, it doesn't work.

At the Center for Health Transformation, we've outlined health

reform after health reform that would save hundreds of billions of

dollars, but it's fundamentally different than the way Washington

thinks. And it's -- it's very frustrating to watch people -- when you

say cost control, you're either ripping off the hospitals, you're

ripping off the doctors, or you're ripping off somebody because cost

control defined by the government means somebody gets...

(CROSSTALK)

DEAN: Wait a minute. You -- you -- not you personally -- but the

Republicans have had times over the last -- since the last time we tried

this, was 15 years, where you had the president, the House, and the

Senate, and nothing happened.

GINGRICH: And they failed. I agree.

DEAN: So, OK, so we've got to do something.

GINGRICH: I'm not defending that.

DEAN: We think this will work.

STEPHANOPOULOS: One of the other claims being made about the bill

-- and it's related to cost control -- is an -- and opponents are

spreading the idea that the president's plan will encourage euthanasia.

Most recently, Sarah Palin, on her Facebook page yesterday -- I think it

was Friday night actually -- said that, "The America I know and love is

not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to

stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide,

based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in

society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is

downright evil."

Now, as you know, Mr. Speaker, the president called that

outlandish. He said...

GINGRICH: But why -- why didn't you put up what Dr. Zeke Emanuel

said? Because Dr. Zeke Emanuel, who's the chief adviser to the

president and brother of the chief of staff, said in writing...

STEPHANOPOULOS: He's not the chief health care adviser. He's

written three articles between 1996 and 2008 that include some of those

phrases...

(CROSSTALK)

GINGRICH: ... standards.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Those phrases appear nowhere in the bill. The only

thing...

GINGRICH: But...

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... but let me just explain what's in the bill and

then get you to respond to that. The only thing in the bill is they

would allow Medicare to pay for what they say is voluntary counseling on

end-of-life issues.

GINGRICH: I think people are very concerned, when you start talking

about cost controls, that a bureaucracy -- we don't -- you're asking us

to trust the government. Now, I'm not talking about the Obama

administration. I'm talking about the government. You're asking us to

decide that we believe that the government is to be trusted.

We know people who have said routinely, well, you're going to have

to make decisions. You're going to have to decide. Communal standards

historically is a very dangerous concept.

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not in the bill.

GINGRICH: But the bill's -- the bill's 1,000 pages of setting up

mechanisms. It sets up 45 different agencies. It has all sorts of

panels. You're asking us to trust turning power over to the government,

when there clearly are people in America who believe in -- in

establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.

DEAN: Well, look, this is something Newt and I agree on. I don't

want somebody in between the doctor and the patient. I don't want the

possibility of losing your health insurance. I don't want people

setting standards or denying care. That's all what we have now under

the private health insurance system. That's what happens.

Look, I've practiced -- I've practiced for 10 years. My wife is

still practicing. Never once did I have a Medicare bureaucrat tell me

what I could or couldn't do for a patient, but all the time we have

bureaucrats from the insurance companies calling up and saying, "We're

not going to cover this, and we're not going to pay for that, and we're

denying coverage of that."

The system we have right now is broken. We need to fix it. I think

giving the American people some choices about how to fix it makes sense.

STEPHANOPOULOS: OK, we're going to have to end it there.