True Lies

Last night, President Obama repeated claims that his opponents are not telling the truth when they say the Democrats' health-care legislation would cover illegal immigrants and pay for abortions. Ramesh Ponnuru explains in the most recent issue of National Review that Obamacare opponents are not the ones dissembling on these issues and others:

Even the most hyperbolic claim that the critics of congressional health-care legislation have made - that it would lead to "death panels" - isn't a lie. The people who make this claim believe, first, that some proponents of liberal health-care legislation want to ration care and, second, that passage of the legislation would make that goal more likely. Those beliefs are both sincerely held and true. The phrase "death panels" may mislead some people into thinking that the bill literally establishes a panel that would choose by name who would live and who would die. But it encapsulates a sound argument.