But in today’s vicious news cycle, lies take on lives of their own on Web sites, blogs and e-mail chains and go viral in seconds. Ms. McCaughey’s claims were soon widely circulated in the thirst for ammunition against the Democrats’ health care reform plan. “Mandatory counseling for all seniors at a minimum of every five years, more often if the seasoned citizen is sick or in a nursing home,” was how Rush Limbaugh described the provision a week later. “We can’t have counseling for mothers who are thinking of terminating their pregnancy, but we can go in there and counsel people about to die,” he added.

Two days later, the lie found its way into Republican politicians’ statements. “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law,” declared the House Republican leader, John Boehner of Ohio, and Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan. I was shocked. This really struck at the heart of what I was trying to do  to build consensus.

Still, nothing could prepare me for what came next. As luck would have it, on July 28 I was presiding over the House of Representatives when my Republican colleagues decided to have a filibuster of one-minute speeches attacking the Democratic health care reform proposals, or rather, the proposals as seen through their skewed vision.

Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina made the singularly outrageous claim that the Republican version of health care reform “is pro-life because it will not put seniors in a position of being put to death by their government.” More groups and politicians repeated and exaggerated the claims.

The most bizarre moment came on Aug. 7 when Sarah Palin used the term “death panels” on her Facebook page. She wrote: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

There is, of course, nothing even remotely like this in the bill, yet other politicians joined the death panel chorus. On “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” the former Republican House speaker, Newt Gingrich, refused an opportunity to set the record straight. Instead, Mr. Gingrich noted “the bill’s 1,000 pages,” as if the number of pages was an excuse for his misrepresentation, and then declared, “You’re asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there clearly are people in America who believe in establishing euthanasia.” The Speaker Gingrich I served with a decade ago would have been appalled at the blatant and repeated falsehoods of the Newt Gingrich of 2009.

Such behavior is a graphic example of how the issue of health care was hijacked. Town hall meetings became dominated by people shouting down their opponents and yelling misinformation. Some town hall participants even told politicians to keep government out of their Medicare  something that would be difficult to pull off since Medicare is a government program.