I’m probably being more self-disclosing than I would like to here, but it was no accident that we caught this bit of demagoguery by Rep. Barney Frank on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”. The show usually has a good line-up of guests, representing a wide spectrum of political ideologies – and discussion occurs – mostly – with little shouting or talking over each other. Below is an excerpt from Rep. Barney Frank’s appearance on the show today, in which he discussed the possible combination of spending cuts and revenue increases (taxes) that could possibly be worked out between the parties. As you’ll see, Rep. Frank goes off the rails when he talks about “end of life” issues.
Anyone who wants to see or read the full exchange can go to this link. The original video has options for both a synced transcript and closed captioning.
In this, Frank makes the outrageous claim that we can save a ton of money by stopping something that isn’t actually happening — medical professional “forcing” medical care to people at the “end of life” who just want to be left alone and die peacefully.
This is demagoguery because the right to refuse treatment – especially in the case of people in the final stages of a terminal illness – is a settled matter. It is illegal for a hospital to “force” life-saving or life-extending treatment that you don’t want. I give Barney Frank credit for being a pretty intelligent politician and policy wonk – in this case it was the grandstanding politician rather than the policy wonk who was talking.
In short, he offered up a nonexistent “problem” we could “fix” to save money. It probably hit the right emotional notes with people. The thing is, there will be same pretty intelligent Republicans he’ll have to deal with when negotiating – they won’t buy this any more than Frank will be inclined to believe some of the more outrageous stuff coming out of that camp.