Palin Keeps Up The “Death Panel” Attack

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Sarah Palin is sticking to her point about the death panels — with footnotes!

In a new Facebook post entitled “Concerning the ‘Death Panels,'” Palin further explores her insistence that the health care bill’s provisions for voluntary counseling on end-of-life decisions constitutes a government plan to get rid of undesirable patients.

“With all due respect, it’s misleading for the President to describe this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients,” Palin says. “The issue is the context in which that information is provided and the coercive effect these consultations will have in that context.”

She later adds: “Is it any wonder that senior citizens might view such consultations as attempts to convince them to help reduce health care costs by accepting minimal end-of-life care?”

Note, however, that many of Palin’s footnotes are to other people’s statements of opinion, which in turn don’t create anything that approximated Palin’s original statement: “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.”

So the real question for evaluating her statement, is whether counseling on end-of-life decisions — which patients are not required to go through — constitutes a “death panel” that would condemn a senior citizen or Palin’s baby to death by depriving health care.

Latest DC
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: