When Sarah Palin first said something about “death panels” in reference of a certain provision on Obama’s new health care reform law, she was mocked without mercy. In fact, she was even featured in MAD Magazine’s Top 20 Dumbest People of 2009 for mentioning what the publication referred to as “imaginary death panels.”
However, it seems that death panels do indeed exist under ObamaCare. These death panels do not stop with Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, coming also from Republican administration in several different states across the country as well.
Health Reform Death Panels: True?
On August 7, 2009, Sarah Palin went on the popular social networking site Facebook to say: “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.”
Palin’s scornful condemnation led to the Democrats dropping “death panels” off the health care package. On the contrary, the Democrats have discovered a means to accomplish their objective through regulation. A Medicare regulation was recently added on January 1 that pays doctors to encourage their patients to consider their options for end-of-life care, including an emphasis on foregoing aggressive life-saving procedures and treatments.
States Using “Death Panels” to Cut Costs
Along with the new Medicare rule on end-of-life, state governments are applying death panels in order to help with budget concerns.
A report released by The Washington Post says: “In Arizona, the government headed by Gov. Jan Brewer summarily stopped approving Medicaid payments for many organ transplants in October; one man had a liver virtually snatched away while he waited to go into the operating room. He couldn’t get it unless he came up with $200,000 to pay for the procedure.
In Indiana, the state Medicaid program denied a lifesaving operation last year to a 6-month-old boy who lacked a thymus gland, which generates cells that the body uses to fight infection. The Indiana Family Social Services Administration said the procedure was ‘experimental’ — even though it had been successful in 43 of the 60 cases in which it had been applied. The state twice denied the family’s appeals, but fortunately the publicity caused by this case prodded two health care companies to pay for the $500,000 operation.”
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