The Ugliest Health-Care Debate

As expected, the public option was the pivot point; Weiner argued for single-payer or at least a strong public insurance plan, and McCaughey, as predicted, argued every step of the way that even a watered-down version of the public option would be deadly for everyone involved. McCaughey warned repeatedly that less-discussed elements of the legislation, like using comparative effectiveness research to determine which treatments are superior or rewarding hospitals for using commonly acknowledged best practices, were in fact the most dangerous of all.

"I'd like to hear if Anthony is going to vote for that bill even though it will devastate New York's hospitals, New York's patients, and New York's health-care workers!” she proclaimed.

• Michelle Goldberg: Is Obamacare Pro-Life? At one point McCaughey seemed to advocate going beyond removing passages of the bill that would reimburse doctors for discussing living wills with their patients (the source of phony “euthanasia” rumors she's spread with great success), saying that some doctors refuse to follow living wills in general and treat their patients regardless of their final wishes. As Weiner pointed out, living wills were not only legal (and until recently uncontroversial) but McCaughey's call to physicians to shred them was blatantly illegal.

It can be hard to tell what angle McCaughey is going for sometimes. Is she just a contrarian? A more academic Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin? It's hard to ignore that her views happen to line up with pharmaceutical and insurance companies' wildest fantasies or that she recently resigned from the board of a medical-supply company to avoid conflicts of interest after her high-profile battle with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. And recently Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson uncovered internal memos from Philip Morris from the early 1990s that described how they helped shape a noted magazine article McCaughey wrote (entitled “No Exit,” it was published by The New Republic) that helped kill President Clinton's health-care push. She denied that she’d had any contact with Phillip Morris and instead suggested to me that the Phillip Morris staffer who wrote the memo was “somebody puffing himself up” by attaching his work to her name.

There was one truly bizarre moment in the debate, at the very end of the evening. Moderator Ben Smith of Politico asked about her organization, the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. McCaughey passionately argued for establishing best practices guidelines in hospitals on how to avoid infections and then penalizing doctors who fail to follow them. "I'm very much in favor of rewarding hospitals for following proper safety measures," she said, describing how withholding payments from doctors for failing to follow safety procedures could help prevent deaths.

Weiner looked stunned: McCaughey was suddenly calling for more intense government regulation of health-care practices—and building her argument on the same principle as the comparative effectiveness studies supported by the Democrats that she had just spent the last hour decrying as "a body blow" to patients and a "medical assault on seniors." Just moments earlier, she had talked about how "you don't want your doctor having to choose between you and avoiding a government penalty," but there was no clear reason why the guidelines she laid out for preventing infections shouldn't be applied to any other health-care practices, let alone feared as a deadly bureaucratic takeover as she alleged. Her position seemed to be that government should get out of the health-care business, except when it came to her pet cause.

So who won? Weiner did his best, but some progressives in the audience questioned the wisdom of giving McCaughey such a prominent forum in the first place. “It is impossible in a comparable amount of time to knock down the misstatements that she can make so quickly and so briefly,” one of McCaughey's recent debate partners, Brookings Institute senior fellow Henry Aaron, told The Daily Beast. “So all you can do I think is go after and discredit her.”

With the two of them making a joint appearance on MSNBC the next morning before a far larger TV audience, the publicity surrounding the event offered yet another opportunity for McCaughey to demagogue the debate.

Weiner’s view: “I'm either a masochist or a sadist,” he told The Daily Beast. “You decide.”

Benjamin Sarlin is a reporter for The Daily Beast. He previously covered New York City politics for The New York Sun and has worked for talkingpointsmemo.com.

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