Rubin Sztajer left a German concentration camp alive, but he worries about surviving a government health care overhaul.
"I've been sentenced to death before by the Nazis," said the 84-year-old from Timonium. "I don't want to be sentenced again."
Seniors like Sztajer are fearful that government bureaucrats will block access to their medical care if President Barack Obama's plan becomes law. These concerns are being fed, in no small part, by an effective conservative assault on a relatively short provision that involves end-of-life counseling.
The notion that health care legislation would encourage life-shortening measures for the elderly or infirm - even government-assisted suicide - moved swiftly from Twitter feeds to accepted fact, repeated on Web sites and echoed by current and former elected officials. As a result, opponents succeeded in fashioning a wedge issue out of an idea that has been part of federal law since the 1991 Patient Self-Determination Act and supported in the past by both major parties.
The campaign launched shortly after House Democrats released their sweeping health overhaul measure on July 14.
Two days later, in a talk radio appearance, Betsy McCaughey of the conservative Hudson Institute attacked the measure's Advanced Care Planning provision. McCaughey, a former Republican lieutenant governor of New York who also helped derail Bill and Hillary Clinton's health care overhaul in 1994, described the House proposal as a "vicious assault on elderly people."
"The Congress would make it mandatory - absolutely require - that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner," she told former Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson on the show he started last spring on 125 radio stations.
In fact, there is no such requirement.
According to a sponsor of the provision, Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, the benefit is "completely voluntary." Medicare would reimburse doctors who consult with a patient about such matters as whether the patient would want to be hospitalized, receive antibiotics or have nutrition and hydration artificially administered.
Conservative radio, TV and Web sites helped promote the inaccurate claim.
Among the more unlikely sources of information: an out-of-work Phoenix-area blogger, Peter Fleckenstein, who lost his job at a real estate development company when the housing market crashed.
