TWO OP-ED pieces in last Sunday’s Globe illustrate just how far off track the debate on health care reform has been pushed.
Peter Lucas’s satirical piece “No country for old men, indeed’’ is nonsense on stilts. Opponents of health care reform have taken the sensible suggestion that everyone should have a living will, and turned it into a claim that President Obama wants to kill seniors to control health care costs. Lucas’s “modest proposal’’ indulges and disseminates this outrageous distortion.
Meanwhile, Jeff Jacoby’s “Musings, random and otherwise’’ runs a familiar play from the Karl Rove playbook: When caught doing something reprehensible, say the other side does the same thing. While Democrats did revile George W. Bush, they did not send what amounts to Brown Shirts to disrupt community meetings on urgent public issues. And let’s not pretend that what we are seeing in these protests from the right is genuine “grass-roots activism.’’ The current lobbyist-funded campaign to stop health care reform at all costs, fueled by mass-media distortions and robo-spammed talking points, is controlled from the top, not the base.
One thing is clear: Our health care system is not the best in the world, just the most profitable.
For the moment, the debate is being driven by those who want to keep it that way.
William F. Coyne Jr.
Roslindale 
