The hardest thing we progressives have to do is counter arguments from the Right based on lies. Two summers ago I remember sitting in the living room with my mother having a discussion about "death panels." Not being a Fox News viewer, it was my first encounter with that particular lie, so I had nothing to say about it. I remember feeling as though I had just had the wind knocked out of me...my eyes popped open and my jaw fell slack. It was such a ridiculous, outlandish sort of claim that I feared for my mother's sanity. If she had told me that she had been abducted and anally probed by little green men I would have been only slightly more concerned.
Little did I realize that there would be a double-digit portion of this nation's public that would believe that Obama was the next Hitler (only targetting the elderly rather than the Jews) before the end of the summer. There's no point in arguing with such people. Truth is irrelevant to Fox viewers. A year after the Health Care law was passed, some people still believe that "death panels" are real. Not that anyone even knows what constitutes a "death panel." I do not want to know if my mother still believes it. Perhaps she thinks that there were "death panels" in the original bill sponsored by the Dems, and that John Boehner swept in and rescued her from them.
That was last year, and this year brings a new collection of lies from the right. This time I was again caught off guard by my new in-laws. Visiting Republican family members (both my parents and my brother suffer from the affliction) has always been trying. Now I have a brand-new set of them after marrying my wonderful new husband. My new sister-in-law had a doosie for me over Thanksgiving. After hearing from my new father-in-law that his doctor was going to suffer because the new HC law cut Medicare reimbursements (a misrepresentation, but not an INSANE one, at least!), she told me that she was now being taxed on her health benefits! My husband is an accountant, and he was pretty sure that wasn't possible, but when faced with an outrageous lie we were both caught off guard. After all, we hadn't read the entire bill cover to cover. She stuck to her guns and insisted on it. She was unmoved by the fact that my husband's daughter, who is 25, would be covered under his health insurance because of the bill. His father was not impressed with having already received a $250 check to cover some of his expenses for prescription drugs and would have even more coverage of "donut hole" drugs in the coming year (he was unaware of that new benefit). She was underwhelmed by the fact that if she changed jobs and had to get new health insurance, her coverage of expensive and essential anti-rejection drugs for her previous kidney transplant could not be denied (a very real probability).
Though several members of every family in this country will be helped in very real ways by this new law, all the Republicans can do is parrot Fox lies. How do you argue with that? How is it possible that there are still people in this country (double-digit percentages!) that believe, at best, that the HC law hurts them somehow financially and at worst, that it is some sort of neo-nazi conspiracy leading to mass euthanasia?
When we got home, my husband did some research on the HC law and found that it requires employers to list the value of benefits on workers' W-2 forms. Somehow, that new set of figures on her W-2 led my sister-in-law to the erroneous belief that there was a new tax on those benefits. Of course, that's incorrect, but more important is the question of how she came to that conclusion. Was it a Fox News Alert? Did her Republican employer plant it in her brain? Was it on some conservative blog? All of the Above? I'd love any readers out there to answer that question. After all, we know whence the "death panel" lie sprouted...Sarah Palin's fertile loins. But these types of little white lies from my in-laws may be the most damaging of all. We can laugh off the Nazi conspiracy theorists, and eventually the Tea Party will be but a punchline. But the belief that Democrats are out to stifle small business and the working man has always hurt us the most.