NY Sun: The Palin Patch

Palin wins again
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Excerpted from today's editorial in The New York Sun:

Hats off to President Obama for what the New York Times reports this morning is a reversal of course by which the administration will drop the use of a regulation to cover under Obamacare end-of-life planning that the Congress had specifically declined to provide via the legislative process. One could call it the “Palin Patch,” after the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, whose warning that this kind of planning, when funded by the government, could lead to what amount to “death panels.”

It happens that we are not against end-of-life planning.

[...]

It also happens , however, that we share Mrs. Palin’s concern, particularly when the counseling is coming from doctors rather than sages. Covering such counseling via a government program that is also paying for the medical treatment seems all too likely to lead to the kind of death panels of which Mrs. Palin warned, which is no doubt why congress took the funding out of the Obamacare bill in the first place. Better to leave such matters, which involve the nexus of medicine and religion and ethics, in private hands.

That wasn’t what moved the Obama administration to make the Palin patch. According to the Times report — in a story by Robert Pear, who also broke the story of administration’s attempt to sneak end-of-life counseling into use by regulation after Congress had refused to do it by legislation — the administration had come to recognize the procedural error and “political concerns were also a factor.”

[More]

Meanwhile, Politico's Ben Smith was more succinct:

"Palin wins again"

- JP