You can always tell when a high-profile conservative has made a logically irrefutable statement about health care reform—-the nutroots go even crazier than usual (no mean feat).
That’s what happened when former Alaska governor Sarah Palin had the temerity to point out the blindingly obvious truth about what she accurately described as “death panels”:
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. 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.
In response to this assertion, Palin was called “certifiably insane,” “Zombie Queen,” and a “gruesome mix of camp and high farce.” The nicest thing they said about her was that she was “clinically wrong.”
But Palin isn’t wrong. President Obama and his congressional accomplices obviously believe that rationing is the only way to control health care costs in the United States.
As I explained in the American Spectator a couple of weeks ago, this is why they have created a new hive of health care apparatchiks called the “Federal Coordinating Council for Effectiveness Research”:
This new bureaucracy is intended to operate like its European counterparts, meaning that it will assign a monetary value to your life and deny your care if you contract a malady whose cost-of-treatment exceeds that amount.
This is happening right now in Great Britain and other countries already saddled with the kind of government-run health care envisioned by the President and his Democrat allies.
In Perfidious Albion, the bureaucracy responsible for putting a price on an average Brit’s head bears the Orwellian acronym “NICE.” Michelle Malkin lists some of its atrocities here.
Palin has, as she always does when she speaks out, created a firestorm of rage on the left. But they aren’t angry because she’s wrong. They’re angry because she’s right.
UPDATE:
Sitting in for Sullivan, Chris Bodenner labels William Jacobson (to whom I link above in paragraph 3) a “death panel apologist” and “proves” that the Cornell professor is wrong about Palin by providing an idiotic quote from Mike Crowley of TNR.
Oh! Not literally a death panel! Funny how some people misunderstand quotation marks as indicating precision and literalism.
It is difficult to believe that someone this stupid can also be this smug. In some ways, though, that’s the very definition of the contemporary “progressive.” These people are just too smart to think. At any rate, I guess I’m a death panel apoligist as well. Excellent!
Comments 5
Sadly, some don’t realize that she’s right and actually believe the extensive disinformation campaign. They tend to be the more self-absorbed young people who are mad because their freebies are being threatened. They’re the scariest because they don’t want to see the evidence;have no understanding of medicine, history or economics; they aren’t bothered by the corruption among the Czars and legislators behind this legislation or the eugenics beliefs of Obama’s advisors; and are incapable of seeing what’s really going on. They’re real live illustrations of how the Final Solution came to be so readily.
Posted 09 Aug 2009 at 6:29 pm ¶Palin’s right - the old and disabled will be terminated just as sure as those aborted kids already are.
Posted 10 Aug 2009 at 7:30 am ¶Where is Sarah’s source, where in the bill proposed does it say that health care will be rationed? I challenge you Bob Breslaw, and others to pull actual text from the bill where it says this.
Posted 11 Aug 2009 at 12:01 am ¶David, who signed this into law in Texas?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Directives_Act
“Section 166.046, Subsection (e),[1] which allows a health care facility to discontinue life-sustaining treatment against the wishes of the patient or guardian ten days after giving written notice if the continuation of life-sustaining treatment is considered medically inappropriate by the treating medical team. ”
Posted 11 Aug 2009 at 3:30 am ¶By your standards, private health insurance is running death panels right at this very moment.
Let’s suppose that you are “covered” by the private insurer of your choice.
Let’s further suppose (God forbid) that you are diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that is generally untreatable.
Let’s further suppose that there’s an expensive experimental treatment that might (say 10% chance) extend your life by two or three years.
Guess what? Medicaid probably won’t cover it. Neither will the NHS in the UK. And neither, incidentally, will your private insurer.
And that’s a good thing in general. Odds are that they’d simply be flushing money down the toilet. Which would result in higher premiums (in a private system) or higher taxes (in a public one).
If I’m paying for health care coverage (public or private), I don’t want it covering procedures that don’t work because paying for failure is expensive. I want it paying for treatments that are…(wait for it)…effective. Hence Effectiveness Research.
There’s actually a larger point here. Often there is more than one way to address a medical problem. To make a trivial analogy, I can get rid of a headache by spending $150 at a luxury spa and getting a nice deep tissue massage. Or I can take a couple of aspirin for 10 cents. Both will be effective. Personally, I think it’s worthwhile looking into which treatments are the most cost effective.
Will someone please tell what’s conservative about shoveling money into medical procedures that cost more and accomplish less? You do understand that that’s what you’re defending here, don’t you?
Posted 13 Aug 2009 at 2:44 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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