My latest column for Kaiser Health News:

I respect honest disagreements about policy. You think health care reform is a bad idea? That it will run up the deficit or make it harder to find a doctor? I think you're wrong, but that's a reasonable debate and I'm happy to have it, just as long as you're truthful about what you are arguing and make some good faith effort to learn the facts.

Often, though, the noisiest voices in the health care reform debate don't do those things. They see a headline, figure out its political utility and use it to score cheap points. And they do so without any apparent interest in the nuances of policy or science that might make the issue just a little bit complicated.

Sometimes we see this on the left. But, at least in the last few years, we've seen it much more frequently on the right. It happened throughout 2009 and 2010, during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, when conservative critics claimed that the initiative would create "death panels" charged with making decisions to stop treatments for people deemed too old to save. Now it's happening again in the wake of a controversial regulatory ruling about a cancer drug.

The drug is Avastin, manufactured by Genentech. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was withdrawing approval of the drug for treatment of late stage breast cancer. The move was not unexpected or without grounding. In September, an FDA advisory committee that includes not just physicians but also patient advocates had recommended the change by a 12-to-1 vote.