Sarah Palin’s Christmas Gift To America: More “Death Panels”!

Just when it appeared the furor over government control of health care and Sarah Palin’s infamous accusation that health reform legislation will set up an “Obama death panel” to euthanize unwanted seniors and the disabled had quieted, the essentially fabricated controversy has blown up again as the former Alaska governor doles out a verbal stocking full of coal to the president and Senate Democrats.

With the Senate poised to pass a moderate reform package that cuts out a government-run public insurance option - a main source of the government “takeover” worries of conservatives - and many other liberal provisions that raised the ire of Republicans, Palin has resurrected her own “death panel” talking point with Twitter and Facebook musings just two days before Christmas.

The fact-checking organization PolitiFact has named Palin’s original claim that the president and congressional Democrats would force certain citizens to stand before a “death panel” the “lie of the year” for 2009, but that isn’t stopping Palin (who seems to refer to the non-partisan PolitiFact as”friends” of Nancy Pelosi) from using the opportunity of Senate approval of a health bill to attack reform and raise the specter of a “death panel” to reduce medical costs.

Palin first revived her “death panel”accusation through her Twitter feed on Tuesday, referring to the potential for the Senate bill to be merged into an “unrecognizable” form out of the House and asking “R death panels back in?”

…merged bill may b unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal:R death panels back in?what’s punishment 4not purchasing mandated HC?

Palin expanded on her cryptic query about the possibility that “death panels” are “back in” with another lengthy Facebook post later on Tuesday, entitled “Midnight Votes, Backroom Deals, and a Death Panel.”

Palin slams the Senate health care bill as a “Democrat health care take-over” and “the most far-reaching and expensive expansions of the role of government into our lives.”

She also expanded on her renewed claim that “death panels” will become standard whenever President Obama gets to sign a reform package into law. Palin argues that a provision setting up something called the “Independent Payment Advisory Board,” charged with finding savings in Medicare spending, will actually work to institute rationing of care for patients (one assumes this would only affect Medicare although Palin appears to generalize the threat of rationing to the entire health care system) and become a de facto “death panel.”

 Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C. No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:

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In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?

The rest of the Facebook post shifts way from the “death panel” claim and brings up other criticisms of the health bill. Palin again fails to specify how a “death panel” would operate or if it actually means killing people directly, although  Palin has chided the media in the past for taking the “death panel” wording “literally.”

Something else striking about the new round of “death panel”accusations flying in from the commentary hub that Palin’s social media outposts have become is that its latest incarnation is unquestionably different from the first mention of “death panels” way back in August.

Back then the former governor first brought up the phrase in direct connection to a provision in an early House version of reform that would allow Medicare to pay for a patient’s end-of-life counseling sessions with physicians, not the cost-savings panel she now links with the term. Palin and other conservatives seized upon this bipartisan provision as a potential means for “Obama’s death panel” and “his bureaucrats” to select which patients (even disabled children like the Palins son, Trig) would be allowed to receive medical care.

In a column titled “Statement on the Current Health Care Debate,” Palin wrote that as “Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!”

She questions Democratic promises that the health care reform plans will reduce the cost of health care, invoking economist Thomas Sowell, saying the only way to cut costs is to refuse treatment.

“And who will suffer the most when they ration care?” Palin asks. “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.”

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Asked specifically what the former governor was referring to when painting a picture of an Obama “death panel” giving her parents or son Trig a thumbs up or down based on their productivity, Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton responded in an email: “From  HR3200 p. 425 see ‘Advance Care Planning Consultation’.”

That’s a curious reading of page 425 of the House Democrats’ bill, which refers to “advance care planning consultation,” defined as a senior and a medical practitioner discussing “advance care planning, if…the individual involved has not had such a consultation within the last 5 years.”

No matter the amount of truth contained in either of these serious accusations leveled at Democrats and the president, it is clear that Palin’s “death panel” storyline has changed - without explanation. Is the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee on her way to earning a repeat title for “lie of the year” in 2010?

 

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