The Lie Machine Killing Health Care Reform [1]
Submitted by John Stauber [2] on
"According to internal documents obtained by Rolling Stone [3], Conservatives for Patients' Rights [4] had been working closely for weeks as a 'coalition partner' with three other right-wing groups in a plot to unleash irate mobs at town-hall meetings ... . 'The insurance industry is up to the same dirty tricks, using the same devious PR [5] practices it has used for many years, to kill reform,' says Wendell Potter [6], who stepped down last year as chief of corporate communications for health insurance giant CIGNA [7]. ... The campaign to mobilize the town-hall mobs began with a script [8] written by the right's foremost fearmonger, Frank Luntz [9]" who "outlined a battle plan for conservatives to block what he branded the 'Washington takeover' of health care. ... Distributed widely to Republican [10]s on Capitol Hill, the memo framed the right-wing attack on health care reform. ... Armed with the script ... a tight coalition of deep-pocketed groups took the lead in mobilizing the town-hall protests. The two primary groups -- Americans for Prosperity [11] and FreedomWorks [12] -- actually grew out of the 2003 breakup of an outfit called Citizens for a Sound Economy [13] that had been integral in the fight against Hillarycare [14]."