57 Facts About Betsy McCaughey

1.

Elizabeth Helen McCaughey, formerly known as Betsy McCaughey Ross, is an American politician who was the Lieutenant Governor of New York from 1995 to 1998, during the first term of Governor George Pataki.

2.

Betsy McCaughey unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for governor after Pataki dropped her from his 1998 ticket, and she ended up on the ballot under the Liberal Party line.

3.

Betsy McCaughey has been a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and Hudson Institute thinktanks and has written numerous articles and op-eds.

4.

Betsy McCaughey was a member of the boards of directors of medical equipment companies Genta and Cantel Medical Corporation, but she resigned in 2009 to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest with her public advocacy against the Affordable Care Act.

5.

Betsy McCaughey and her twin brother, William, were born in Pittsburgh to Ramona Peterken, and her husband Albert, a factory janitor.

6.

The family moved around the Northeastern United States for six years before it settled down in Westport, Connecticut, where Betsy McCaughey's father did maintenance and later engineering work at a nail clipper factory.

7.

Betsy McCaughey attended public schools in Westport through the 10th grade, spending much of her free time at the library.

8.

Betsy McCaughey received a scholarship to attend Vassar College, where she majored in history.

9.

Betsy McCaughey wrote her senior thesis on Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, won several fellowships, and received her BA, with distinction, in 1970.

10.

Betsy McCaughey went on to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City, earning her MA in 1972 and her PhD in constitutional history in 1976.

11.

Betsy McCaughey won Columbia's Bancroft Dissertation Award in American History in 1976 and her dissertation was published by the prestigious Columbia University Press in 1980, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson.

12.

Betsy McCaughey contributed a chapter about Johnson to the 1979 book The American Revolution: Changing Perspectives by William M Fowler and Wallace Coyle.

13.

Betsy McCaughey took courses in accounting at Columbia's School of Business.

14.

Betsy McCaughey was then moving up as an investment banker.

15.

Betsy McCaughey married wealthy investment banker and prominent Democratic Party fundraiser Wilbur Ross Jr.

16.

Betsy McCaughey was an assistant professor at between 1981 and 1983, teaching two classes per year, both at Columbia University Between 1983 and 1984, she had a National Endowment for the Humanities postdoctoral fellowship.

17.

Betsy McCaughey authored a book, Government by Choice: Inventing the United States Constitution, which cataloged the exhibit.

18.

Betsy McCaughey testified at a July 22,1992, hearing before the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and helped produce a report suggesting constitutional amendments to fix perceived flaws in the Electoral College.

19.

Betsy McCaughey wrote op-ed columns that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and USA Today in which she opposed plans involving local and state redistricting to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and she criticized federal court-ordered desegregation of schools in Connecticut and New Jersey.

20.

Betsy McCaughey supported the nomination of a federal judge, Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court by arguing that he would judge cases there on their merits and not tend to interpret cases in a manner consistent with his conservative beliefs; Betsy McCaughey supported a tobacco company in litigation before the Supreme Court and praised the 1992 Planned Parenthood v Casey Supreme Court decision, restricting abortion rights.

21.

In February 1993, the John M Olin Foundation funded a fellowship at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, for McCaughey to write a book on race and the legal system to be titled Beyond Pluralism: Overcoming the Narcissism of Minor Differences.

22.

Betsy McCaughey wrote op-eds over the next six months in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today in which she supported the 1993 selection of a jury from predominately-white, Republican, rural counties for the urban -located retrial of African American and Democratic US Representative Harold Ford, Sr.

23.

Betsy McCaughey expanded her op-eds into a five-page article titled "No Exit", which appeared as the cover story in The New Republic and was published a few days before President Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address.

24.

Betsy McCaughey responded that her claims came "straight from the text of the bill".

25.

Betsy McCaughey said that she accepted the nomination by believing she would be Pataki's "point person on health policy".

26.

Betsy McCaughey was initially tasked by Pataki to work on education policy and on reducing New York's Medicaid budget.

27.

Betsy McCaughey was publicly critical of the governor's proposed cuts to Medicaid and gave a pro-choice speech without his advance permission.

28.

In March 1996, The New York Times reported that Betsy McCaughey was locked out of the governor's inner circle because she had violated the "unwritten rules" of the conventional lieutenant governor's role.

29.

Rather than following protocol as lieutenant governor by taking a seat with everyone else during Pataki's State of the State address to the legislature in 1996, Betsy McCaughey stood for the entire 56 min speech's length, further attracting attention to herself at her governor's expense.

30.

Betsy McCaughey later selected New York State Supreme Court Justice Mary Donohue to replace her.

31.

Betsy McCaughey was the early frontrunner for her new party's nomination process, in part because of her statewide name and face recognition and in part because of the financial support of her wealthy then-husband.

32.

Betsy McCaughey was defeated in the Democratic primary election by New York City Councilman Peter Vallone.

33.

Betsy McCaughey had earlier received the nomination of the Liberal Party of New York for governor and stayed in the general election.

34.

Betsy McCaughey's campaign attracted little support, and she received only 1.65 percent of the general vote for governor.

35.

Betsy McCaughey has worked on patient advocacy and healthcare policy issues since leaving office in 1999.

36.

Betsy McCaughey was senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute beginning in 1999 and an adjunct senior fellow beginning in 2002.

37.

Betsy McCaughey was a member of the board of directors of Genta, a company focused on the delivery of innovative products for cancer treatment from 2001 to her resignation in October 2007.

38.

Betsy McCaughey was a member of the board of directors of the Cantel Medical Corporation, a medical device manufacturer, from 2005 to her resignation in August 2009 to avoid the appearance a conflict of interest while she was engaged in advocacy on healthcare reform legislation.

39.

Betsy McCaughey remains the chair and representative of the organization.

40.

Betsy McCaughey has appeared on Fox News, CNN, and many radio shows to discuss her research and how to prevent infection deaths.

41.

Betsy McCaughey criticized the campaign, saying that it should instead refocus on educating people about cancer prevention and detection.

42.

Betsy McCaughey argued that evidence had shown that the US had higher rates of cancer survival than countries with universal healthcare coverage because of shorter wait times for treatment, better availability of new drugs for therapy, and more frequent cancer screenings.

43.

Betsy McCaughey expanded her argument into a "Brief Analysis" published the following month by the National Center for Policy Analysis in which she maintained that the US was number one in the world in cancer care.

44.

Betsy McCaughey published an op-ed on February 9,2009, and claimed that the Obama administration's pending American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 stimulus contained the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, hidden provisions that would harm the health of Americans as well as the healthcare sector of the economy.

45.

Betsy McCaughey argued that the bill would establish two powerful new bureaucracies: the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research.

46.

Betsy McCaughey said the National Coordinator would monitor patients' electronic medical records to ensure that doctors and hospitals treated patients in a way that "the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective" and that doctors and hospitals deviating from the government's "electronically delivered protocols" would be penalized.

47.

Betsy McCaughey said that the Federal Coordinating Council would be composed of appointed bureaucrats charged with a costcutting agenda that would slow the development of new medical products and drugs and ration healthcare for senior citizens.

48.

Betsy McCaughey opined that the bureaucrats would use a comparative effectiveness formula, which, in the United Kingdom, had resulted in a requirement that senior citizens go blind in one eye before the government would pay for a treatment to save the sight in the other eye.

49.

Betsy McCaughey's viewpoint was echoed and extended by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and multiple Fox News Channel broadcasters.

50.

Betsy McCaughey urged their repeal so that their potential impact could be studied further.

51.

Betsy McCaughey opposed the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 debated in Congress in 2009.

52.

Betsy McCaughey made allegations about certain provisions of the bills that provided for Medicare payments to physicians for end-of-life and living will counseling and about Ezekiel Emanuel, then an adviser to the Obama administration's budget director and chairman of the bioethics department at the National Institutes of Health.

53.

The provisions in the legislation that Betsy McCaughey advocated against were removed from the bill before it became law.

54.

In July 2009, Betsy McCaughey claimed that a section in the pending healthcare legislation, "Advance Care Planning Consultation", actually prescribed "euthanasia for the elderly" because it included provisions that.

55.

Betsy McCaughey described Emanuel in a New York Post opinion article as a "Deadly Doctor" who advocated healthcare rationing by age and disability.

56.

Betsy McCaughey resigned from the Board of Cantel Medical Corporation on August 20,2009 "to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest during the national debate over healthcare reform", according to a press release by the company.

57.

On her Twitter feed and on television, Betsy McCaughey stated that members of Congress and other government employees were granted a "special subsidy" and a "premium illegally arranged by Obama" under the Affordable Care Act.