Will the Real Death Panel Please Step Forward?
Federal health officials are proposing that Medicare begin paying doctors to discuss end-of-life issues with their patients, six years after the "death panel" controversy erupted in the early days of the debate over President Obama's health-care legislation.
decide who received care. The provision was removed from the final Affordable Care Act legislation.
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.
If a "death panel" never rationed health care, did it really earn the name?
That's the question for Congress this week: The House soon will vote to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board established by the Affordable Care Act, dubbed at various times a "death panel" and rationing board by its opponents.
So which one is the real death panel? Neither one, of course. It was all nonsense from the start. But apparently federal officials are going to take a crack at bringing back the one we killed, while Congress is going to take a crack at killing the one we kept. So we could end up with two death panels or with none.
But wait! There's more! You may recall that Republicans are also suspicious of evidence-based medical research. They were convinced that "comparative effectiveness" research was just a stealth measure to take treatment decisions out of the hands of local doctors and instead centralize them in the hands of green-eyeshade DC bureaucrats. In other words, a death panel. So there are actually three death panels. They're everywhere!
For more on all this, check out Michael Mechanic's explainer on the end-of-life controversy here.