Don Surber: Curse you, Sarah Palin, for killing the death panels

Don Surber at the Charleston Daily Mail finds some fallout still in the air from Gov. Palin's warning about death panel back in 2009. He recalls how her remark cause heads in the liberal media to explode, including some at the sham site Politifact, which disingenuously branded it Lie Of The Year:

Calling it a lie was problematic since Obamacare had yet to pass and no one would know what was in the bill until the president signed it into law in March 2010. Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi even said we have to pass the bill in order to see what is in it. Yet 8 months before its passage, the Mensas on the left knew what was in it.

But what was wrong with Sarah Palin’s statement was not that it was false but that it was true, and the truth is poison to liberals.

[...]

I want to thank Eric Kleefield who in his eagerness to demonize Sarah Palin helped bring the planned death panels to the public’s attention.

So there are death panels and they are designed to kill people in order to save money because Obamacare — like the NHS — is about saving money, not lives. Socialists want to making life optional. This is why they support abortion on demand and why they death panels.

Ezra Klein is not the first to complain that we spend “so much” on grandma before she dies. I heard the same arguments 20 years ago when liberals were preparing us for Hillarycare. The argument is simple: We spend too much on medical care knowing we are going to die eventually anyway.

Sarah Palin instead killed the death panels. Well played

[fallout]

- JP

Mark Levin: IAPB is the death panel Sarah Palin warned about

"Sarah Palin was exactly correct when she called this a death panel."
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h/t: theblogprof

- JP

Jeannie DeAngelis: Pelosi Proves Palin's Point

The former Speaker is Washington's newest Death Panel Diva
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At the American Thinker Blog, Jeannie DeAngelis is the latest to point out that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have unwittingly proved Gov. Palin's original point that the Democrat's idea of health care reform policy is more of a threat to Americans than disease itself:

When the health care debate was raging, one of arguments from ObamaCare opponents was that an eventual shortage of government monies would result in lost lives. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was mocked and disparaged as a fool for warning Americans that ObamaCare would usher in "death panels" where, due to budgetary restrictions, the aged and chronically ill would be denied care.

Even President Barack Obama joined smarmy liberal comedians like Bill Maher to publicly scoff at the idea of "death panels." The left condemned what they called outlandish scare tactics employed by conservatives attempting to stop a policy that would provide coverage to 30 million uninsured Americans, but in effect would put the government in control of life and death issues.

Fast-forward to 2011 and the very people who condemned Sarah Palin and the Republicans for being over-the-top on the anxiety chart became the harbingers of imminent death panels, only this time the fatalities would be driven by budget cuts.

Take for example Nancy Pelosi saying that the budget bill would starve six million seniors to death and that impoverished children would be jettisoned out of the Head Start program. Worse than that, Nancy said that Republicans, led by Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), were declaring an all-out "war on women."

[...]

According to Nancy, even modest spending cuts would result in a nation of unemployed, underpaid, uneducated, penniless, sick females unable to retire. Pelosi predicted American women would be destined to roam the streets like zombies, riddled with cancer and missing womanly parts of their anatomy, all victims of "the ideological old style agenda of the Republicans."

This is the woman who "called out former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) for having made the ‘lie of the year' for claiming the healthcare bill would set up ‘death panels.'"

[More]

- JP

Don Surber: Obama hare, Palin tortoise

The death panels idea is not far-fetched
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Our out-of-touch president could lose all 50 states to Sarah Palin next year, comments the Charleston Daily Mail's Don Surber, who says Obama is the hare, and Gov. Palin is the tortoise:

Sarah Palin learned first-hand as a governor that “government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.”

Medicaid — run by the states but funded in large part by Congress — pays as little as 70 cents on the dollar for services rendered. That unpaid 30 cents is passed on to privately insured patients, who then see their premiums soar. This then gets twisted into the government making the case for government-run health care since it saves money.

The death panels idea is not far-fetched.

Britain calls its death panel NICE. It denies drugs for sick patients saying Avastin and other medications are too expensive.

Obama already is playing NICE by revoking approval of Avastin retroactively — based on price, and not on the safety or the competence of the drug.

That is a death panel, plain and simple.

Of course, most conservatives knew this. Why credit Sarah Palin?

Because she got attention.

And she roped-a-doped the president.

[...]

So the president and his smug buddies — Rahm, Axelrod and Gibbs — went after Sarah Palin tooth and tong, rather tackle the legitimate criticisms and worries. People who have lived through the Depression and World War II know that money is not unlimited. Talk of “saving” $500 billion from Medicare comes out of their hides. Instead of reasoning with them, Obama mocked their concerns.

[ More]

- JP

James Taranto: 'Death Panels' Revisited

How Sarah Palin helped defeat ObamaCare's deceptive advertising
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The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto argues that U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson's recent ruling declaring The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would have been a more difficult judicial decision had ObamaCare been politically popular:

But it did not and does not. Americans never bought the bill of goods that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and their supporters in the formerly mainstream media tried to sell. A good deal of the credit goes to Sarah Palin, for coining the phrase "death panel" in an August 2009 Facebook post.

Four months later PolitiFact.com, a project of the left-leaning St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, named the phrase "lie of the year"

[...]

In truth, PolitiFact was more vulnerable to the charge of lying than Palin was, for its highly literal, out-of-context interpretation of her words was at best extremely tendentious.

[...]

Palin put the term "death panel" in quotes to indicate that she was using it figuratively. She was not lying but doing just the opposite: conveying a fundamental truth about ObamaCare. Proponents were describing it as a sort of fiscal perpetual-motion machine: We're going to give free insurance to tens of millions of people and reduce the deficit! As a matter of simple arithmetic, the only way to do that is by drastically curtailing medical benefits.

"Health care by definition involves life and death decisions," Palin wrote. ObamaCare necessarily expands the power of federal bureaucrats to make such decisions, and it creates enormous fiscal pressures to err on the side of death. Whether it establishes literal panels for that purpose is a hair-splitting quibble. By naming this "lie of the year," PolitiFact showed itself to be less seeker of truth than servant of power.

President Obama, meanwhile, treated Palin's criticism as a joke. As we noted at the time, he told a New Hampshire town meeting: "The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for 'death panels' that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that we don't--it's too expensive to let her live anymore." The transcript records that the audience laughed at this callous "joke."

The perpetual-motion claim wasn't the only deception at the heart of the argument for ObamaCare...

[More]

h/t: Benyamin Korn

- JP

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

Quote of the Day (December 30, 2010)

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The Editors at the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal:

"The left won't admit that Sarah Palin had a point about rationed care."

- JP

Jeffrey Lord: Berwick Sets Up Death Panels By Fiat

"Governor Palin has been vindicated"
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It's about much more than just death panels, as if they aren't dangerous enough, explains Jeffrey Lord at American Spectator. The more disturbing issue -- and a threat to the American idea of freedom and liberty -- is the manner in which the Obama Administration intends to implement death panels. They will be forced on an unwilling citizenry by "a central government of rule-making un-elected bureaucrats":

Sarah Palin was right.

John Boehner -- make that Speaker-elect of the House John Boehner -- was right.

[...]

In other words, the 2009 charge leveled by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the then-House Minority Leader Boehner that Obama fully intended to set up what Palin termed government "death panels" -- panels that Boehner said would set the government on the road to euthanasia -- is no longer a charge.

It's reality. By executive fiat -- in this case a new Medicare rule issued by Obama Medicare chief Dr. Donald Berwick.

Palin, who made the charge on her Facebook page on August 7, 2009 during the health care debates, came under a fusillade of scornful and demeaning political attacks from political opponents after pointedly saying this about the prospect of death panels:

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.

Her famous sharp criticism was enough for the plan to be quickly dropped by Congress.

Now, with Americans absorbed in a festive holiday and ignoring Washington momentarily, the Obama administration has found a way to achieve its death panel goal anyway...

[...]

Governor Palin has been vindicated. Speaker Boehner has been vindicated.

And Palin's critics in particular now have more than holiday eggnog all over their faces. Obama's Dr. Berwick has re-ignited one of the most hotly controversial issues of the entire health care debate just as a conservative ascendancy prepares to take power in the next Congress. With no less than Boehner himself taking the gavel from Nancy Pelosi as the new Speaker of the House.

What does this new rule say and do, exactly?

It inserts the federal government in end-of-life planning, precisely as Palin said was Obama's intention. Not, as was true of its original legislative formulation, every five years. But annually. No one of any sense objects to an individual and doctor having end-of-life discussions about living wills and such whenever they wish. Only the Obama administration and its obsession for control wants the government to incentivize the issue so that doctors must raise it annually, a system that on its face pressures the most deeply vulnerable of Americans in the most Orwellian of terms to end their lives.

Control and pressure. Pressure and control. This is the only two-step philosophical/political dance liberals know. It is, as it were, primal. And the Berwick Medicare rule, constructed in secret and released on Christmas Day when it no one is looking, is a perfect example -- if hardly the only example -- of how the Obama Administration views its role. Control and pressure. Pressure… and control.

Versus the conservative concept (shorthand version) of liberty and freedom.

And Palin's critics in particular now have more than holiday eggnog all over their faces.

[More]

This Orwellian nightmare serves to remind us, Lord points out, that Governor Palin took almost all of the heat for taking this issue, buried deep as it was in thousands of pages of obscure legislative doublespeak, and raising it to the national consciousness. Her critics have been proven wrong by Berwick, Reich and other authoritarian leftists. Knowing the Palinophobes as we do, no one expects them to own up and give her due credit for being right.

But nothing they say or do can change the fact that Gov. Palin clearly has demonstrated real leadership on this issue -- leadership which Lord suggests is of presidential caliber -- by sticking to her guns on a matter which "is now coming back to bite the American people in the form of a new Medicare rule on death panels -- reported of all days on Christmas day."

Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

- JP

Quote of the Day (December 27, 2010)

Democrats would have preferred to keep this under wraps
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Joy Tiz at CFP:

"Sarah Palin was excoriated for making the entirely correct observation that when a government controls health care, rationing becomes inevitable. Democrats squealed like stuck pigs, but dropped the execrable end of life counseling language from ObamaCare... On Christmas Day, the NYT revealed the resurrection of the death panel by way of the unelected bureaucrat... It’s a short hop to pressuring patients to cooperate with their doctors in agreeing to opt out of all but the most meager palliative care."

- JP

John Sexton: Media Continues to Lie About Palin’s 'Death Panels' Comment

"The press ignores the clear history and Palin’s statements about what she meant"
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At Big Journalism, John Sexton cites the recent AP story which reports how Obama’s own deficit commission concluded that Obamacare isn’t going to come in under the cost curve unless some serious top down cost cutting is done. Sexton then states his point:

In regard to “death panels” the AP makes the same mistake made by every other commentator on this issue. It’s time to set the record straight. Yes, it’s true there were no “death panel” provisions in the Affordable Care Act, but it’s also true Palin’s statements were never, ever aimed at a specific provision in the bill. They were always intended as statements about the dangers of turning health care over to government bureaucrats. Let’s lay out the facts in detail and try to put down this pernicious media created myth.

Sarah Palin’s “death panels” comment appeared on Facebook on Friday August 7th, 2009. The post makes no mention of any specific element of the bill. Instead it directs readers to [a] clip of Michele Bachmann on the the house floor...

[...]

Bachmann is referencing [an] article by Betsy McCaughey which brought to light remarks made by Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel. Palin mentions Dr. Emmanuel’s remarks in the midst of her Facebook post, but both her opening and concluding paragraph makes it clear that her “death panels” statement is ultimately her worry about what could happen after a government takeover of heath care...

[...]

There were many prominent voices on the right who understood that Palin was expressing a fear about nationalized health care in general and not a criticism of a specific proposal. But the liberal media continued to miss the point.

[...]

Palin and many other conservatives made clear at the time that “death panels” was not a criticism of a specific provision in the bill. From the moment she wrote it, “death panels” was a catch all phrase designed to highlight the real danger of putting government in charge of deciding what can be spent on health care. It was the left from the Post to the President which (accidentally or not) conflated this with claims about specific provisions in the bill. Their motive in doing so, i.e. being able to call Palin a liar, is understandable. They are, after all, partisans who wanted to see the bill pass. But one wonders why supposedly independent news organizations like the AP continue to echo this demonstrably false claim right up to today.

[More]

No need to wonder why AP and other lamestream media outlets have been distorting everything Gov. Palin writes, says and does for over two years. Just plug that and the journo's "slobbering love affair" with Barack Obama into the equation, and it reduces down to 2+2=4.

- JP

Sarah Palin was right: Krugman calls for 'Death Panels'

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Lefty economist Paul Krugman would never overtly admit that Sarah palin has been right all along about Death Panels, but his Freudian slip on network television Sunday was tantamount to such an admission. NewsBuster Noel Sheppard reports:

Although he was likely taking a swipe at former governor Sarah Palin with the reference, Paul Krugman on Sunday recommended "death panels" as a means of helping to balance the federal budget.

In a Roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said of what recently came out of the President's deficit commission, "Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes"

KRUGMAN: No. Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes. It's going to be that we're actually going to take Medicare under control, and we're going to have to get some additional revenue, probably from a VAT. But it's not going to happen now.

After he realized what he had said, Krugman later tried to clarify his remarks:

By trying to clarify, Krugman seems to be digging himself deeper into a hole, for "how much we’re willing to spend for extreme care" was part of Sarah Palin's point when she first wrote about this at Facebook in August 2009.

[...]

In the end, Krugman's attempt at being "deliberately provocative" was really him saying in front of the cameras what Palin and others warned was the danger of allowing further government intrusion into healthcare.

If only such dangers were better explained to the public before Congress voted on this bill in March.

Rush is all over this.

We love the smell of liberal hubris in the morning. It smells like... vindication!

- JP

Dan Calabrese: AP = All Propaganda

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Dan Calabrese notes that incumbent U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina's 4th congressional district was destroyed (by a whopping 42 percentage points) in the GOP primary this year by local prosecutor Trey Gowdy. Incredibly, the Associated Press blames Sarah Palin, even though she never endorsed any candidate in that race:

Now, many people can tell you why Inglis lost, although none of them work for the AP. Inglis lost because America finds itself in a precarious fiscal situation and needs to elect people with certain qualities in order to fix that situation – and Inglis does not possess these qualities. America is careening toward fiscal insolvency because of Congress’s refusal to get federal spending under control. Solving the problem means electing people who will reform entitlements, reject pork-barrel politics and stop trying to kick the can down the road so the next generation of Americans can deal with the problem.

[...]

So in an attempt to explain all this, the AP highlights what it sees as Inglis’s brave, high-minded denunciations of Glenn Beck, whom he labels a divisive fearmonger. But that is just an entry point for the AP to take a shot at one of its favorite targets – Sarah Palin.

Now, let’s back up for a second. You will recall that Palin denounced the ObamaCare socialized medicine bill for the fact that it will likely lead to “death panels,” a description that refers to committees of “experts” who will make decisions about who gets life-saving treatment and who doesn’t – largely based on what it will cost the government.

You will also recall that the major media, particularly the AP, screamed long and loud to anyone who would listen that there are no death panels in the bill. The media made this insistence so many times that the left-wing propaganda group MediaMatters declared Palin’s statement “debunked” based on the fact that the media said so many, many times, which qualifies as evidence of truth in the twisted world of MediaMatters.

What you may not recall is, as documented in this column and elsewhere, the bill (now a law) absolutely does contain the panel to which Palin refers. It is called the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and it is so important to the supporters of ObamaCare that Harry Reid added a stipulation that it cannot be eliminated without a two-thirds majority vote of both houses of Congress.

But the AP has, for nearly a year, treated Palin’s death panel comment as an established falsehood. So the AP now sees Inglis as the tragic victim of his own courageous honesty because he, too, bought the AP’s propaganda.

[...]

Poor Bob. He lost the seat to which he had a divine right because he wouldn’t join in the horrible demagoguery practiced by Sarah Palin, and now that his career as a congressman-for-life has been cut tragically short, the AP must run to him for an explanation of all that has gone wrong in American politics.

Because people who lose primaries for their own seats by 42 points are usually the smartest people in the room, don’t you know?

Dan Calabrese has much more to say on this at North Star National.

h/t: roy y

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #31: Thomas Sowell on 'A Duty to Die'

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Ssrah Palin's early warning radar detected low-flying health care rationing back in the day when ObamaCare was just an idea being kicked around by the neosocialists, and her prediction that "death panels" would be part and parcel of the left's socialized medicine agenda has been vindicated many times, despite the leftist campaign to ridicule her and brand her a liar.

Professor Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, in a National Review commentary, examines the socialist notion that the elderly have a "duty to die." Here are a few choice morsels:

One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die” rather than become a burden to others.

This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.

[...]

It is today, in an age when homes have flat-paneled TVs and most families eat in restaurants regularly or have pizzas and other meals delivered to their homes, that the elites — rather than the masses — have begun talking about “a duty to die.”

Back in the days of Aunt Nance Ann, nobody in our family had ever gone to college. Indeed, none had gone beyond elementary school. Apparently, you need a lot of expensive education, sometimes including courses on ethics, before you can start talking about “a duty to die.”

[...]

Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which “a duty to die” is just one.

Sarah Palin is the Paul Revere of her time. Read Dr. Sowell's full NRO op-ed here. A linked list of all previous posts in our "Sarah Palin Was Right" series is here.

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #30: Dr. Berwick Confirms Rationing

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Sarah Palin wrote in a September, 2009 Wall Street Journal opinion piece:

"Is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats' proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans... But the fact remains that the Democrats' proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we've come to expect from this administration."

Democrats and other supporters of socialized medicine have, as the governor noted, dismissed the "death panels" phrase, but many went further and dismissed the idea that ObamaCare would lead to rationing by any name. Since then, Gov. Palin's argument has been vindicated time and again (See here, here, here, here, here, here and here). Obama supporters not only dismissed both the rhetoric and the reality of rationing, but viciously smeared Sarah Palin, calling her "ignorant", "stupid", "a liar" and everything but a child of God.

Now more confirmation of ObamaCare rationing is being heard from President Obama's own nominee to run the Medicare and Medicaid programs:

But now that ObamaCare has passed, at least some of its supporters have become quite candid in admitting that government rationing is on the way.

Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor, has been nominated by President Obama to run Medicare and Medicaid. But Dr. Berwick has not been shy at all about saying that rationing will be the order of the day under ObamaCare.

In an interview in 2009 in the journal Biotechnology Healthcare, Dr. Berwick declared, "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open."

In other words, Dr. Berwick does not mind rationing so long as it is government making the decisions about how that rationing takes place -- about who gets what care and who does not.

Dr. Berwick has spoken, and we are reminded, yet again, who the real liars are.

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #28: Orszag Admits 'Rationing Panels'

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Sarah Palin is vindicated yet again, this time by another one of President Obama's own:

Peter Orszag, President Obama’s budget director, basically admitted that under Obamacare, access to doctors and medicine will be rationed. And the people on the “powerful rationing panel” making life-or-death decisions will be government bureaucrats, not medical professionals.

Hmmm. Let's review. A “powerful rationing panel,” not accountable to anyone but the president, made up entirely of bureaucrats (no doctors on board), which makes the decisions about whether you or your family members gets a needed medical procedure or prescription for medication...

Sure sounds like a "death panel" to us.

Remember when lefty economist Robert Reich admitted:

"And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die."

The Obamunist Left went through all sorts of contortions trying to explain that one away. We can't wait to watch them try to weasel out of this one.

Bottom line: Sarah Palin was right, but it would kill them to admit it in so many words.

More: For a Catholic perspective on this, see Pat Archibold's blog post here.

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #27: ObamaCare and the Marquis de Sade

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Scragged contributing editor Petrarch writes in "ObamaCare and the Marquis de Sade" that more people now believe Sarah Palin was right about death panels than when she first made the charge:

The more Americans hear about the Democrats' plans, the better they understand the details, the more powerful and active their fear and loathing becomes.

Sarah Palin attacked Obamacare as creating "death panels" nearly a year ago; the Democrat response was that this was a lie. Shouldn't a year be sufficient to debunk a false accusation?

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, after his year of persuasion, explanation, town meetings, and providing fodder for talk shows, more people believe that Palin was right about death panels than when she first leveled the charge. This is in large part because both England and Canada's national health systems have what amount to "death panels" that refuse treatments based on expense or age. England's "death panel" even comes with the photogenically Orwellian acronym of NICE. A whole lot more Americans have heard of NICE today than had a year ago. They didn't like what they heard, they believe it's an integral part of Obamacare, and they want no part of it.

What happens when an out-of-control government rams a policy down the throats of the American people that they do not want? History records the Whiskey Rebellion, the violence of Prohibition, and, of course, the Civil War; surely we don't want to follow those examples?

Petrarch is erred on one detail, however. Gov. Palin first mentioned death panels in an August 7 Facebook op-ed, which would make it almost eight months ago, rather than nearly a year.

- JP

Quote of the Day (January 16, 2010)

Kevin Fobbs:

"So in 2010 and beyond if we need to have more Tea parties or more people like Sarah Palin standing up and going rogue, then so be it because it is not just an election or control of congress or the presidency that hangs in the balance, but it is whether or not our children, our grandchildren, and our nation’s future are put on life support until a medical panel decides the time and place when they will pull the plug."

- JP

Quote of the Day (December 24, 2009)

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John McCormack:

"It is perfectly clear that Palin is talking about rationing in general. She specifically made the argument that the government's refusing to pay the cost of health care will lead to rationing care, and she also wrote that her 'baby with Down Syndrome' could be affected by such rationing. How would 'end-of-life counseling' for the elderly cause the death of a disabled baby?"

- JP

Sarah Palin Was Right #23: Dan Calabrese on Death Panels

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Posting at The North Star National, Dan Calabrese says not only was Sarah Palin right about the death panels, but Harry Reid is attempting to make them permanent:

It’s no cause for celebration, and Sarah Palin’s not the type for schadenfreude, but she was right about the death panels. So right, in fact, that the death panels are receiving some very special and probably unconstitutional protection in the Senate health care bill.

The creation of the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board – the panel that decides who goes without coverage so costs can be cut – cannot be repealed, according to language Harry Reid has inserted into the bill, without a supermajority vote of two-thirds.

[...]

What Palin said all along was that government-run health care, especially established on the notion that it could somehow cut costs, would inevitably lead to rationing. And she was confident an administration in love with the idea of “experts” designing “systems” would put together some sort of panel to decide how to ration the coverage.

Enter the Independent Payment Advisory Board, so important that Harry Reid seeks to protect its existence forever by requiring a two-thirds supermajority to ever kill it.

The radical liberals in control of the federal government are doing all they can to make this a very scary Christmas and a bankrupt new year. Read the unabridged original Dan Calabrese post here.

- JP

Sarah Palin: "This is about politics, not health care"

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Sarah Palin went to her Facebook Notes page to post a scathing indictment of Congressional Democrats and their health care bill:

Midnight Votes, Backroom Deals, and a Death Panel

Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C. No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:

“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.”

In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?

The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill’s calculations call for a reduction in Medicare’s spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:

“It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death panels” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] quality of care” – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.

This health care bill is one of the most far-reaching and expensive expansions of the role of government into our lives. We’re talking about putting one-seventh of our economy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talking about something as intimate to our personal well-being as medical care.

This bill is so unpopular that people on the right and the left hate it. So why go through with it? The Senate is planning to vote on this on Christmas Eve. Why the rush? Though we will begin paying for this bill immediately, we will see no benefits for years. (That’s the trick that allowed the CBO to state that the bill won’t grow the deficit for the next ten years.)

The administration’s promises of transparency and bipartisanship have been broken one by one. This entire process has been defined by midnight votes on weekends, closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists, and payoffs to politicians willing to sell their principles for sweetheart deals. Is it any wonder that Americans are so disillusioned with their leaders in Washington?

This is about politics, not health care. Americans don’t want this bill. Americans don’t like this bill. Washington has stopped listening to us. But we’re paying attention, and 2010 is coming.

- Sarah Palin

- JP