Sarah Palin's charge of death panels

In an article at American Thinker on the existence of “death panels,” the author, Joseph Ashby, says it’s not in HR 3200 because it already exists: “H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, even more commonly known as the Stimulus Bill and aptly dubbed the Porkulus Bill) contains a whopping $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. And on this council is Dr. Death himself, Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

One of the commenters at this post, Redhawk, analyzes the role of statism in our Congress’s health care plan.

When you get past all the doubletalk, this is what the people who are advocating a government-run healthcare system truly believe. The foundation of the statists' philosophy is that the people in a society are in essence the property of the state. Given limited resources and the state will always claim to be short of resources, the state will decide the extent to which a person will be medically treated for a serious illness, depending upon that person's perceived value to society. To the statist, this makes perfect sense. Of course in actual practice, the final decision can be heavily influenced by how many friends in Washington one can petition, which is a storyline right out of Atlas Shrugged; how one's success in life and in this case life itself will be determined by political pull. Washington apparatchiks and their hangers-on will of course automatically receive the best of care.

I have not read whether this is happening in Britain, but I would be surprised if it were not, since such a system invites corruption. There you can be denied cancer treatment even if you are willing to pay for it out of your own pocket or you may be denied stints if you are above the arbitrary age limit of 59; unless of course you lucky enough to have friends in high places who can make an exception in your case. Otherwise, you have a duty to die. They may or may not decide to pay for the pain medication to relieve your final suffering, since it is all subject to the whim of some bureaucrat. This is the type of system to which we are heading unless we can stop it. We are being asked to quietly accept a socialist plan that promises to improve the healthcare of roughly 20% of the population, many of whom are here illegally, but in doing so will intolerably degrade the healthcare for the rest of us.

HT Murray

Did you see that Sarah's book is already #3 on Amazon and it isn't published yet, and that Glenn Beck's new book is outselling the Kennedy memoirs?