[2] A historian by training, with a PhD from Columbia University, McCaughey has, over the years, provided conservative media commentary on US public policy affecting healthcare-related issues.

[3][4] The family moved around the Northeastern United States for six years before it settled down in Westport, Connecticut,[1] where McCaughey's father did maintenance and later engineering work at a nail clipper factory.

[18] In the late 1980s, McCaughey briefly considered a career in TV news,[5] but she opted instead for a position as a senior scholar at the Center for the Study of the Presidency, serving from 1989 to 1992.

There, she wrote an article, book reviews, and a guest editorial for its journal, Presidential Studies Quarterly (PSQ),[19] and an op-ed in USA Today advocating reform of the Electoral College method of electing the president.

[21][22] McCaughey also 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,[23] and she criticized federal court-ordered desegregation of schools in Connecticut and New Jersey.

[27] 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.

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 (Memphis)-located retrial of African American and Democratic US Representative Harold Ford, Sr.,[28] and praised the 1993 Shaw v. Reno Supreme Court decision, favoring five white voters who said their rights had been infringed upon by redistricting that had been done to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

[29] On September 22, 1993, US President Bill Clinton delivered a nationally televised speech about his healthcare reform plan to a joint session of Congress.

[30] On the last day of Hillary Clinton's testimony, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by McCaughey, who wrote that the 239-page draft legislation differed markedly from the White House's public statements and would have "devastating consequences".

[31][32] Citing words and phrases from the draft, she argued that the 77 percent of Americans then covered by insurance would see a downgrade in their policies, and most would not be able to keep their own physicians but be forced into price-controlled health maintenance organizations (HMOs), which would provide only the most basic care.

[33][34] 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.

[39] Senator Bob Dole, in the Republican Party response to the President's State of the Union, used some of McCaughey's arguments of fewer choices, lower quality, and more government control.

[40] Bill Kristol's Project for the Republican Future quickly launched television advertisements featuring quotes from McCaughey's two Wall Street Journal op-ed columns and her The New Republic article.

[41][42] The Clinton White House press office issued a response to McCaughey's "No Exit" article by arguing that it contained "numerous factual inaccuracies and misleading statements".

"[45][39] According to The Washington Post, the "No Exit" article, the White House response, and the ensuing television and radio interviews with McCaughey made her a star: "Her toothy good looks, body-conscious suits, Vassar BA and Columbia PhD reduced right-wingers to mush.

[7] By January 1995, McCaughey had produced a set of recommendations that required cost cutting by hospitals and nursing homes so that the poor did not have to bear the entire burden of balancing the state's Medicaid budget by a reduction of their benefits.

[69][70] She 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.

[73] FactCheck.org noted that comparative effectiveness research had been funded by the US government for years but agreed with McCaughey that there would be penalties for health providers that did not use the electronic records system.

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

[73][75] Republican US Representative Charles Boustany Jr. of Louisiana, a heart surgeon, added that he feared that comparative effectiveness research would be misused by federal bureaucrats to "ration care, to deny life-saving treatment to seniors and disabled people".

She 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.

In July 2009, McCaughey claimed that a section in the pending healthcare legislation, "Advance Care Planning Consultation", actually prescribed "euthanasia for the elderly" because it included provisions thatwould make it mandatory—absolutely require—that every five years people in Medicare have a required counseling session that will tell them how to end their life sooner [and inform them how to] decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go in to hospice care ... all to do what's in society's best interest or in your family's best interest and cut your life short.

[81] Politifact responded that the end-of-life counseling was voluntary, calling McCaughey's claim a "ridiculous falsehood" and giving it their lowest accuracy rating, "pants on fire".

"[83] During an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart which aired on August 20, 2009, McCaughey repeated these assertions about the counselling sessions and referred to the Factcheck.org as "spot-check dot org", claiming they failed to adequately read the House health care bill.

[85] In August 2009, WNYC's On the Media also addressed McCaughey's claims, concluding that the provision actually mandated that the federal government compensate "counseling sessions" on elder law, such as estate planning, "will writing and hospice care".

[80][86] Factcheck.org said this was incorrect and that "Emanuel's meaning is being twisted ... he was talking about a philosophical trend, and ... writing about how to make the most ethical choices when forced to choose which patients get organ transplants or vaccines when supplies are limited.

[76] 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.

In an August 7, 2012, opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, McCaughey described as "phony" an assertion that repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase federal deficits.

In a September 15, 2013, opinion piece in the New York Post entitled "Obamacare will question your sex life", McCaughey wrote: "Are you sexually active?

[98] On her Twitter feed[99] and on television,[100] 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.