Salon.com > Death Panels

Right still searching for “death panel” proof

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:25:00 +0000

This originally appeared at Brendan Nyhan's blog.

One of the most frustrating aspects of the current debate over the healthcare reform is the way that conservative bloggers and pundits keep trying to find evidence to justify Sarah Palin's false claims about a "death panel."

The latest example comes from bloggers Ann Althouse, Jim Hoft, and Doug Ross, who claim that the decision by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to conduct a National Coverage Determination for the prostate cancer treatment Provenge is evidence of a "death panel" (Althouse headline: "Death panel"; Hoft: "HERE COME THE DEATH PANELS"; Ross: "sounds like a death panel to me").

Imperfection is a start

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:15:00 +0000

Buyer's remorse seems to be setting in among Democrats, even as the U.S. Senate is poised to vote (as I write this) on the most significant piece of social reform since the 1960s.

No less a figure than Dr. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and Democratic National Committee chairman, wrote that, were he a senator, "I would not vote for the current healthcare bill. Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over healthcare and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real healthcare reform."

Dean's reservations have been widely echoed on the left. The healthcare bill's big winners, they complain, are the insurance industry, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and doctors. Because it lacks both the "public option" (a government-run insurance company competing with private ones to drive down costs) and the Medicare buy-in that was initially highly touted, then quickly shot down by Holy Joe Lieberman, some Democrats fear that the party is both providing inadequate coverage and setting itself up for a voter backlash.

Christian right leader sorry for comparing Emanuel to Mengele

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:30:00 +0000

Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League have been getting some criticism for not doing more to speak out against the comparisons some people are making between Obama administration figures and Nazis. In New York magazine, for instance, Peter Keating wrote an article asking why organizations like the ADL hadn't done more, or hadn't been more effective, in countering the suggestions, saying, "[I]njecting Hitler analogies into subjects like Medicare reimbursement rates renders the Holocaust mundane, as though Nazis simply supported big government, rather than genocide."

Seems like the ADL may have gotten the message.

The first example in Keating's article was something that Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said recently: "I want to put it to you bluntly. What they are attempting to do in health care, particularly in treating the elderly, is not something like what the Nazis did. It is precisely what the Nazis did." Land also said he was giving "the Dr. Jose Mengele Award" to Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and medical ethicist who's also the brother of White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and an advisor to the White House on healthcare reform. (I've written before about the various falsehoods being spread about Emanuel; you can read that post here.)

The GOP embraces the big lie

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:13:00 +0000

There it was, in broad daylight on my computer screen, a Wall Street Journal headline so shocking in its brazen embrace of an alternate reality that despite my best interests for mental self-preservation, I was forced to react.

The GOP strategy of principled opposition is winning over independents.

You can call the GOP strategy a lot of things, including, no question, "effective." But the one word you cannot use to describe it is "principled." When Sarah Palin talks about "death panels" and Sen. Chuck Grassley warns about "pulling the plug on grandma," they are not being "principled." They are consciously lying for political gain. In my dictionary, that is the opposite of "principled."

Sign me up for Barack Obama’s death panel!

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:14:00 +0000

Dear Mr. Obama,

Like many Americans, I was initially shocked upon hearing of your proposed death panels. But after a short cooling-off period, I have come around.

It troubled me at first to hear that your followers would be deciding the fate our grandparents -- i.e., who would be rescued, and who would be thrown on the death pile. Then I began to wonder if there might be some sort of rebate program for those of us whose grandparents are all dead. Since no one in my family from this generation will need to be processed, I wonder if the government might be willing to pay $100 in savings per grandparent -- sort of a variation on the "Cash for Clunkers." You and your people would make it worthwhile for us not to have random old people lying around. It goes without saying that this would only include American grandparents. My mother's father, John Wyles, died in Liverpool in 1933, and would therefore not qualify. I think we could all agree on this.