Death Panel

August 09, 2009
Defending Palin's 'Death Panel' remark
Clarice Feldman
Moderate law professor Ann Althouse (an Obama voter) takes issue with 
those who twisted Sarah Palin's criticism of the Obama health care 
proposal. She says Palin's right to be worried and admits she is, too:

         "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."


     She doesn't say that the government will kill disabled (or elderly) 
persons directly, but that death will occur as a result of the decisions 
of cost controlling bureaucrats who with the power to determine who can 
receive various treatments. I don't know why "level of productivity in 
society" is in quotes, nor do I know whether it is the plan to ration care 
on this basis. Those are actually serious matters, and I'd like to know 
the answers. What Kleefeld is doing is trying to sweep Palin aside as a 
big crazy wacko.

     Yes, she used a colorful expression "death panel," but it's a good and 
fair polemical expression if in fact life-saving care will be rationed on 
this basis. I have found myself saying, in conversation, "I'm afraid Obama 
is going to kill me." Now, I'm not picturing him or one of his minions 
coming over to murder me, but I am afraid that as I get older and need 
expensive care to keep me alive that I will be told I cannot have it, 
because at my age, in the government's opinion, there's not enough life 
left in me to be worth the money that I would take from the system that 
needs to pay for everything.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/08/defending_palins_death_panel_r.html