Death (Panel) for Newt
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this blog post misstated the newspaper that Jim Rutenberg works for. He works for The New York Times.
Oops. For the second day in a row, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is getting a harsh reminder that his post-Congress career as an influence peddler is a drag on his GOP presidential campaign.
The New York Times and Washington Post report today that Gingrich wrote a July 2009 op-ed on the paper's web site that praised Gundersen Lutheran Health system for its successful efforts to persuade most patients to have "advance directives" about whether to avoid aggressive and costly end-of-life care. He said that Medicare would save at least $33 billion a year if it followed Gundersen's lead on such practices.
Enter death panels.
Within weeks, conservatives flooded town hall meetings to protest Democratic health care reforms that would have allowed Medicare to pay for family consultations about whether to authorize aggressive life-saving interventions. The provision was inaccurately portrayed by Sarah Palin and many others in the GOP as a step toward "death panels."
Gundersen was a paid client of a Gingrich consulting firm.
Times reporter Jim Rutenberg sums up Gingrich's pickle in one sentence:
"For a second day, Mr. Gingrich's campaign was at the uncomfortable intersection of his high-earning consultancies and his public policy positions."
Yesterday, I wrote about how Gingrich's high-priced advice for Freddie Mac was a story of hypocrisy, cronyism and bad politics. Gingrich is the ultimate Washington insider; it's hard to imagine how anti-establishment GOP primary voters will stomach many more stories like this.
And there are many more to come.
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