Death Panel

Sarah Palin’s uncompromising description of the bureaucrats she claims will ration treatment under Barack Obama’s health care proposals. Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, made what the Talking Points Memo called “a dire statement about health care reform” on her Facebookpage:

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.

Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.

On The Times’s Caucus blog, Katherine Q. Seelye noted:

One problem: None of the bills emerging from various committees includes the kind of “death panel” that Ms. Palin says would be rationing care. It is the kind of mischaracterization that President Obama has complained about, though the White House has had little success in persuading people otherwise.