Frmr Obamacare Chief Pushes Panic, Tells 360K People Hospital Is Out of Ventilators - It Wasn't
Andy Slavitt, the former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, hasn’t comported himself particularly well during the coronavirus shutdown.
The former Obamacare chief obviously sees himself as a canary in the coal mine.
Fair enough. However, he’s the kind of man about whom you see headlines like this: “We Should Be Closer To Panic Than To Calm: Andy Slavitt.”
This isn’t helpful at a time when Google searches for “panic attack symptoms” are up over 100 percent. It’s also unhelpful that Slavitt is an increased-federalization hammer constantly harping about a health care nail. In fact, his harping was so great that another former Obama appointee making an appearance with him on MSNBC actually rage-quit because of his attitude.
Again, exactly what we need right now.
Odds are that if you’re familiar with Slavitt and you’re not a wonk, you probably know him from a Twitter thread which began by stating that “[b]y March 23 many of our largest cities & hospitals are on course to be overrun with cases.”
COVID-19 Prep Update- March 14:
Last night I was on with state & local officials around the US well into the night. By March 23 many of our largest cities & hospitals are on course to be overrun with cases.
I am going to prepare a memo for them. I will share highlights here.1/
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) March 14, 2020
This received quite a bit of play when it was first tweeted, not in the least because of the fact that some of its prescriptions sounded like they were coming from a man who wanted you to panic and panic hard.
Whether or not those alarm bells were entirely called for remains to be seen. However, in at least one case, he’s caused panic about what was going on at one Detroit-based medical group, the Henry Ford Health System, that was entirely unjustified.
Late Thursday, Slavitt tweeted this:
.@ASlavitt deleted his tweets.. because, well, he knew it wasn’t true.. way to go pinhead. pic.twitter.com/g9WSQXLJdr
— Don’t Label Me (@DavidChristoson) March 27, 2020
That was what he sent out to his more than 360,000 followers.
As you may have guessed, this claim was false. Slavitt was remarking on this pamphlet, which was leaked on social media:
Henry Ford Health system pic.twitter.com/fx3nDnkmT9
— Vox Populi (@voxpopulx) March 27, 2020
Now, here was an idea: Someone decided to ask the Henry Ford Health System about this. Lo and behold, the document hadn’t been handed out to people:
Hi @GumboJesus, this policy was developed should we need to implement it. We have not needed it at this time.
— Henry Ford News (@HenryFordNews) March 27, 2020
So, here’s how this went.
The tweet was obviously deleted. Slavitt originally tried to play this off by showing concern to the Henry Ford Health System and linking them to a project he’s helping run in concert with FEMA to distribute ventilators and medical supplies:
You are not the only ones having to think this through.
Let us know how to help. https://t.co/Bk6jdCpLPl will be live in the morning.
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) March 27, 2020
However, being “a major hospital in the Midwest,” as per Slavitt’s original tweet, they would have become aware of that project even if it had just been announced. This was hardly the point, though: Slavitt wanted to make you aware of the fact he was making them aware of the fact.
Well, that didn’t quiet things down any, as you might imagine, so he explained the deletion in these terms:
I removed a tweet because it enflamed a left-right contraversy about how bad the crisis is becoming in major hospitals running low or out of capacity.
While I want to inform with the best knowledge I have, I won’t do that at the expense of that kind of discord right now.
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) March 27, 2020
Yes, people, “it enflamed a left-right contraversy about how bad the crisis is becoming in major hospitals running low or out of capacity.” In other words, it inflamed a controversy in which the other side is wrong — a side which wasn’t really arguing what he was saying they were, but never mind.
With that explanation also having not sat well with most people, Slavitt tweeted this on Friday:
I apologized for the controversy. Now I’m apologizing for the tweet itself. It was a mistake.
But it would be a mistake to let my poor judgment obscure the concern. Hospitals are doing everything they can & a friend in the WH is working on it full time. 2/
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) March 27, 2020
Hold me to account for anything I tweet. But please don’t let up on staying home so as not to effect others as much as possible. As the data I shared yesterday show, it gives health care workers & hospitals the best chance. 4/
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) March 27, 2020
Oh, and this:
Hold me to account for anything I tweet. But please don’t let up on staying home so as not to effect others as much as possible. As the data I shared yesterday show, it gives health care workers & hospitals the best chance. 4/
— Andy Slavitt @ ? (@ASlavitt) March 27, 2020
All right, fair enough.
There are plenty of other issues our country needs to focus on than heaping invective upon Andy Slavitt on Twitter.
That said, in a moment of declared national emergency, I think we ought to talk about the kind of leadership this showed. While Slavitt is no longer in power, he’s still a thought leader, particularly on the left — which is why what he said is profoundly unhelpful.
Slavitt has established a brand as the angel of panic during the coronavirus crisis. If you’re going to spread the contagion of fear, however, you need to have the facts behind you.
I have reason to doubt you when you talk about a hospital not having ventilators and deciding who lives and who dies when you don’t even conduct the due diligence to figure out if that claim is true.
For criminy’s sake, this man was the former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He couldn’t track down one source from the Henry Ford Health System to confirm this before he went live with the Twitter thread?
If he did, were his sources bad? That doesn’t seem to be the case here, as he lied.
Furthermore, Slavitt’s message isn’t “don’t let up on staying home so as not to effect others as much as possible.” It’s fear fear fear fear fear you should be fearing so hard right now why aren’t you fearing as hard as I am I need you to FEAR I’m talking FEAR here, people!
Everyone who’s listening to Slavitt is plenty afraid of COVID-19, thank you, without a constant drumbeat about how they’re not being afraid enough and how this is just the first act of any pandemic apocalypse movie. He’s not convincing the unconvinced, and inducing more fear in the fearful is hardly necessary at a moment where panic is driving us apart, not bringing us together.
It also doesn’t help when all of Slavitt’s policy prescriptions for this moment in our history seem to be exactly what he’s always been preaching: To wit, we need to concentrate more power in the federal government — particularly at the expense of state and local autonomy — and then shower the federal government with resources.
It’s easy to doubt his motives when nothing has changed in Slavitt’s world but how alarmed he is.
I appreciate that Slavitt finally apologized in full (well, closely enough, anyway) for what he tweeted.
Is it too much, however, to ask him to lay off the panic-inducing rhetoric and the assumption that his opponents are acting in bad faith? That would be a more salient — and meliorative — takeaway from all of this.
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