Media Continues to Spin 'Death Panel'

PolitiFact, a misnomer if ever there was one, has named Sarah Palin's statement about health care rationing, which she termed a "death panel," the "lie of the year."

Once again for the media and the Leftists, Governor Palin used the term "death panel" to describe health care rationing. The governor said:

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.

Camille Paglia explained:

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

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I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

This is not difficult, people. Of course, the media and the Leftists, which is mostly one in the same, don't want to report the "death panel" statement truthfully and factually. Like much of their other reporting, they spin the "death panel" quote to their own liking. That way they can create narratives and memes that the majority of voters will never discover are false. As Alan Reynolds pointed out (and you should read his entire piece), the only people who lied about "death panels" were and are the mainstream media.

Mark Levin spent some time recently discussing health care rationing. The entire segment is well worth your time (h/t Uffda):



In case you had any doubt about whether fears of health care rationing are unfounded, Senator Tom Coburn should have put them to rest with his recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Every American, not just seniors, should know that the rationing provisions in the Reid bill will not only reduce their quality of life, but their life spans as well.

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For instance, the Reid bill (in sections 3403 and 2021) explicitly empowers Medicare to deny treatment based on cost. An Independent Medicare Advisory Board created by the bill—composed of permanent, unelected and, therefore, unaccountable members—will greatly expand the rationing practices that already occur in the program.

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Section 6301 of the Reid bill creates new comparative effectiveness research (CER) programs. CER panels have been used as rationing commissions in other countries...

Not only are "death panels" (aka rationing) in ObamaCare, Senator Harry Reid's bill has a provision that requires a supermajority to repeal them:

On page 1020 of the text, [Senator Jim] DeMint discovers that Reid has created a rule binding future sessions of Congress to a supermajority requirement to overrule the bill’s rationing board, the Independent Medical Advisory Board, whose purpose (stated on page 1001) is to “reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending.”

You might think that this would bother even the staunchest liberals. After all, their families will live under health care rationing too. But ObamaCare is a display of the Leftist ideology at work. Richard Ebeling explains that:

At the core of the Obama administration’s push for implementing a comprehensive national healthcare system and related programs is a radical ideological belief in political paternalism and the welfare state.

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[T]he guiding idea behind political paternalism is that the individual cannot be trusted to be a free and responsible human being. Those who wish to socially engineer our lives consider us too ignorant, too irresponsible, and too narrow in our own planning to intelligently and reasonably take care of our own healthcare, retirement, family’s education, or spending and consumption choices.

These paternalists presume to know what is good for us, better than we know ourselves. They are determined to make the world over in their own ideological image – and, of course, all for our own good, whether we want it or not.

A health care "reform" bill pushed through Congress, that the American people do not want, voted on in the dead of night during Christmas week. Bribes and payoffs for votes. The crafting of the bill hidden from the American people. Senators who did not read the bill they voted on. A bill that will not fix the health care system, but will instead lead to health care rationing.

To the mainstream media, much of this is just a game. A big, exciting story to cover. They've covered it the same way that they cover every story about Washington politics and President Barack Obama. When they're not busy propping up the president, they're asking, "Will Obama win? What's the next chess move?" This is not a game. This bill will cause a fundamental loss of freedom in this country.

I'll leave you with Ronald Reagan speaking as a private citizen in 1961: