Sarah Palin Was Right About Those Death Panels (Updated) :: Political News and commentaries

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December 23, 2009

Sarah Palin Was Right About Those Death Panels (Updated)

Topics: Political News and commentaries

Despite claiming to the contrary, it's the St. Petersburg Times and its website PolitiFact.com that deserves the "Political Lie of the Year award," not Sarah Palin. She got it right, the Times and " PolitiFarse" got it wrong. Many knew what she was referring to at the time she made the so-called "Death Panel" charge, but the leftwing media and the political left (the SPT and Politifact.com represent the worst of both) chose to jump to their own conclusions as to what Palin was referring to - and it had nothing to do with criticizing a provision in the House bill under which "Medicare would pay for doctors' appointments for patients to discuss living wills, health care directives and other end-of-life issues," as charged by the leftwing media and the political left.

As Alan Reynolds explains at Cato@Liberty:

[...] What Palin wrote about death panels clearly had nothing to do with counseling or with any other specifics in seminal House bill. What she wrote was: "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."

How could anyone believe Palin's sensible comment about rationing was, in reality, a senseless fear of counseling? To say so was no mistake; it was an oft-repeated big lie.

Rather than even mentioning the House bill, Palin linked to an interesting speech by "Rep. Michele Bachmann [which] highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president's health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff."

Dr. Emmanuel's varied and murky remarks about using panels of experts (like himself) to ration health care are less clear or less candid than those of another bioethicist, Peter Singer of Princeton. Singer's article, "Why We Must Ration Health Care," was a cover feature in The New York Times Magazine on July 15 -- shortly before Palin took the opposing side of this issue.

Singer's argument (about an expensive anti-cancer drug) is that, "If there is any point at which you say, 'No, an extra six months [of life] isn't worth that much,' then you think that health care should be rationed." But the question itself is rhetorical trickery, sophistry. Even if there was certain knowledge about life expectancy with or without some treatment (which is never true), Singer has no right to any opinion about how much an extra six months of my life is worth (and vice-versa) unless he's paying the bills.

Singer wrote, quite correctly, that in "Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits. . . [and] low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients." [emphasis added]

Pending health care bills would make such government-mandated scarcity of health care much worse. There would be massive shifting of money away from Medicare toward Medicaid. But the extra Medicaid money would be spread around more thinly. States would cut benefits to the poor in order to accommodate millions of new, less-poor people lured into Medicaid, at least half of whom (7 or 8 million by my estimate) currently have employer-provided health insurance.

The Senate health bill supposedly intends to slash Medicare payment rates for physicians by 21% next year and more in future years, with permanent reductions in payments to other medical services too. It would also establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board which would be empowered to make deeper cuts which Congress could reject only with considerable difficulty. If that's not quite a "death panel" it would surely not be pro-life in its impact.

Read it all ...

As Reynolds goes on to point out in his piece, it's quite clear enough that the proposed Medicare cuts proposed by Congress won't be achieved, but that efforts in that direction will nonetheless reduce access to care and diminish its quality. So regardless of how you want to color it, it's rationing. And as Reynolds also points out, Sarah Palin predicted that government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And those that will suffer the most when they ration care will be the sick, the elderly, and the disabled. And they are the ones most likely to die as a result of it.

So whatever you want to call the government board or panel that makes the decision to refuse to pay the cost of a procedure or care for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled, their decision resulted in the death of the most vulnerable. To me, that sounds an awful lot like the label of "death panel" is applicable.

Related update: Ed Morrissey writes(emphasis mine)

It didn't take long for Jim DeMint's outrage over highly unusual language protecting a care-rationing board to generate a response from Sarah Palin. This came just days after Politifact called her statement about "death panels" the "lie of the year," but the attempt to rule any Congressional motion that changes the rulings of the Independent Medical Advisory Board out of order in perpetuity has highlighted once again this rationing board and its potential impact in a government-run system. And that, Palin writes at her Facebook page, was her point all along: (More)