Got your attention? Let's throw out some more whoppers to keep you amused.

President Obama is going to appoint Death Panels to put your grandmother to sleep.

Illegal Immigrants are going to get unlimited health care if we reform the U.S. health insurance system and we'll all have to pay for it.

Your private health insurance provider will pay for any kind of surgery or treatment that you need.

Stephen Hawking, the world renowned physicist, would have died long ago if he'd been British and forced to depend on the National Health Service, the socialized medical system there. Hawking suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease.

Okay. None of the above is true. Sorry, if you happen to really believe in them, but there are no plans for Sarah Palin's Death Panels in any health reform package. And if you think about it for a moment, why would there be? As in, why would anyone seeking to put through reform of something as contentious as the American health insurance system include something as incendiary as bureaucratic panels that would decide on doing away with our grandmothers, or babies born with disabilities? It doesn't make the slightest political sense.

As for illegal aliens, no, unlimited health care is not going to be offered to them. That too, is not a vote winner. But the dislike, even hatred, expressed by so many Americans towards illegal immigrants makes this idea an easy sell for those who peddle misinformation and lies.

Then there's your own expensive health insurance. Americans believe in myths, and this is a myth that many people desperately want to believe. They want the comfort of thinking that cold-hearted, profit-making insurance companies are going to take care of them in ways that government-run programs won't.

In reality, insurance companies not only deny life-saving surgery and treatment every hour of every day, they employ well staffed "recission" departments to retroactively deny payments on surgery and treatments, even though they'd been "approved."

That's just one reason that 62 percent of bankruptcies in the USA derive from health emergencies.

And, yes, Stephen Hawking is British, and he is alive because he has received excellent care for many years from the socialized National Health Service.

In a summer season when we've seen bullies and wingnuts show up at "town hall meetings" about health care — sometimes with guns — to disrupt the proceedings, while holding aloft posters depicting President Obama as some kind of Nazi, myths and misinformation are flying around even more than usual.

That Americans are ready to give credence to wild notions like "Death Panels" says something about our national character. We think we're John Waynes, not Comrades. We think we can beat the system somehow, and we think we don't have to pay for the uninsured. But, of course, we do, because the only alternative would be to leave them to die in the parking lot outside the hospital.

Still, we cling to our myths, because giving them up would mean we were wrong, and being wrong about health care is another thing we cannot accept.