Bush's Health Care Ads Not Entirely Accurate
Campaign Offers Little Backing for Claims
Campaign Offers Little Backing for Claims
But never fear. A little further on there's some truth to be read by Harold Meyerson on the Op-Ed page:
If either candidate has a Big-Government-Threatens-You plan, it's Bush. Using the power of the federal government to block Americans from obtaining safe and affordable drugs from Canada (because to do so would lower the profit margins of drug companies that are a mainstay of Republican campaign finances) sounds like a horror story out of Ayn Rand, or the Orwell of "1984." For that matter, Kerry and John Edwards have long supported a patients' bill of rights in dealing with HMOs (the most Kafkaesque bureaucracies on the American scene), but the Republicans have blocked all efforts to enact one.
But in the day-is-night, black-is-white world of the embattled Bush presidency, and the increasingly desperate Bush campaign, it's Kerry who threatens to transform American medicine into doctors' and patients' soviets. In fact -- as I assume Kerry will make clear tonight -- what he threatens is the Bush presidency, which has looked on with (at best) indifference as drugs and health insurance have increasingly moved beyond the reach of middle-class Americans.
