1115.org

John Barrasso is not just a Republican Senator from Wyoming, he’s also a doctor. He has a private orthopedic practice, and he also serves as Chief of Staff of the Wyoming Medical Center.

He is supposed to use his medical degree to “First, do no harm.”

Instead, he chooses to use it to lend false credence to complete falsehoods about healthcare reform. What he’s hoping to do, like all but one or two of his Republican Senate colleagues, is stop healthcare reform dead in its tracks. What that will do is perpetuate a situation where 45,000 Americans are stopped dead in their tracks each year — one every 12 minutes — because they lack healthcare. That translates into doing a hell of a lot of harm.

Here’s the bare-assed lie John Bare-asso propagated on Fox News yesterday, deliberately conflating, with malice aforethought, the federal Preventive Services Task Force’s mammogram guidelines with the healthcare reform bill:

And we just saw this past week the first step in rationing of health care in the country with this panel that they have, this preventive panel. A government panel that says women between 40 and 50 shouldn’t have mammograms. You know, my wife Bobbi is a breast cancer survivor. She was diagnosed by a mammogram, went for an operation, the cancer had already spread. The mammogram has saved her life, but yet this preventive panel that the bill says, this health care bill says, ‘oh no, they’re the ones who get to decide what preventive measures are paid for or not.’ That panel would have not allowed her to have this care.

Bare-asso, remember, is a doctor.

He knows perfectly well that “this panel that they have” is actually “an independent panel of experts first convened by the U.S. Public Health Service during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.”

He knows perfectly well that the panel’s recommendations do not constitute or reflect Administration policy.

He knows perfectly well that the first thing the administration did after the panel released its new mammogram guidelines was to distance itself from the guidelines:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday stressed a new report casting doubt on long-standing mammogram guidelines would not shape White House policy.

The task force — which recommended last week that women begin breast cancer screenings at age 50, not at age 40 as many doctors have long suggested — is “an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make policy recommendations,” the secretary noted.

Its members, she added, “do not set federal policy and they don’t determine what services are covered by the federal government.”

“The Task Force has presented some new evidence for consideration but our policies remain unchanged,” Sebelius said in a statement. “Indeed, I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action.”

He knows perfectly well that the Preventive Services Task Force’s mammogram guidelines are just guidelines that suggest to physicians when women who have no other risk factors should start having regular mammograms. That these guidelines have absolutely nothing to do with health insurance coverage.

He knows perfectly well that there is no way the panel or the panel’s guidelines could have prevented his wife Bobbi from having a mammogram:

Barrasso’s wife Bobbi Brown would have received a mammogram regardless of any recommendation. Wyoming, along with 48 other states, requires insurers to cover mammograms…

He knows perfectly well that the health care bill doesn’t say of the Preventive Services Task Force that “oh no, they’re the ones who get to decide what preventive measures are paid for or not.”

He knows perfectly well that, in fact, “if the Senate bill were to become law all insurers would be required to pay for the procedure.”

So why is he standing there and spouting this massive lie?

Because the hippocratic oath means nothing to him compared to the dictum: “First, toe the party line. Always.”?

Because he has no moral scruples whatsoever about toeing the party line, even when the party line involves the kind of lyin’ that will lead to thousands of preventable deaths not being prevented?

Because that’s just what Republicans do these days, that’s all that Republicans do any more?