ABC’s The View hosted Betsy McCaughey to attack the Affordable Care Act (ACA), praising her as a “health care policy expert” and ignoring her history of misinformation, including inventing the persistent lie that the health care law contains “death panels.”
On the October 29 edition of The View, co-host Barbara Walters introduced a segment with McCaughey by calling her a “health care policy expert” and asking if health care consumers “were not told the truth by the Obama administration,” saying, “they are about to lose their current medical plans and they don’t know what they are getting instead.” The View provided no background about McCaughey aside from naming her as the author of a book opposing the ACA.
McCaughey, who is by no means a “health care policy expert,” has no credibility to comment on the ACA. In 2009, during the legislative debate over the bills that would later become the ACA, McCaughey distorted language in the House version of the bill to claim that it would “absolutely require — that every five years, people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go in to hospice care.” McCaughey’s misinformation was echoed throughout the right-wing media, leading to the lie that the ACA contains “death panels” that will judge whether patients are deserving of life-preserving care.
(Source: MediaMatters.org and ABC-TV)
