"Perhaps it’s a sign of progress that the right’s latest line of attack against health-care reform is far subtler than the “death panel” smear. The new conservative talking point is aimed at women rather than seniors, and it has a kind of surface plausibility that may make it particularly effective. Put simply, the right is claiming that Democratic plans to reform health care will lead to more women dying from breast cancer.

This meme has been around for a while; back in June, Sean Hannity claimed that, should health-care reform succeed, “we’re going to have a government rationing body that tells women with breast cancer, ‘you’re dead.’” Now, though, there’s a systematic effort to publicize the argument. The Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group, is spending over $2 million to broadcast a commercial in eight battleground states, including Colorado, Indiana and Nevada, in which breast-cancer survivor Tracy Walsh warns that health-care reform could kill women like her. Speaking over melancholy piano music, she says, “If you find a lump, you could wait months for treatment, and potentially life-saving drugs could be restricted. Government control of health care here could have meant that 300,000 women with breast cancer here might have died.”"