Frugal Café Blog Zone

Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on December 26, 2010

Graphic credit: Rush Limbaugh website

Despite many Democrat leftists, and a goodly number of Republicans, mocking or criticizing Sarah Palin for months now (even last week) for proclaiming last year that there were “death panels” included in the unpopular ObamaCare plan (Democrat Congress critters hastily removed the “death panels” text from the humongous trillion-dollar, government-mandated health bill), and left-wing Obama-adoring Los Angeles Times stupidly publishing that Sarah Palin’s ‘death panel’ charge voted biggest lie of 2009, guess what?

PALIN WAS RIGHT.

But informed conservatives have known that for well over a year.

Liberals desperately want the health care debate STOPPED — Obama and his statist minions know what’s best for you, so get over it.

Reported by MSNBC, Medicare revives end-of-life planning:

WASHINGTON — A new health regulation issued this month offers Medicare recipients voluntary end-of-life planning, which Democrats dropped from the monumental health care overhaul.

The provision allows Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling to help beneficiaries deal with the complex and painful decisions families face when a loved one is approaching death.

But the practice was heavily criticized by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and some other Republicans who have likened the counseling to “death panels.”

The “voluntary advance care planning” is included in a Medicare regulation issued Dec. 3 that covers annual checkups, known as wellness visits. It goes into effect Jan. 1.

The new regulation was first reported by The New York Times.

For years, federal laws and policies have encouraged Americans to think ahead about end-of-life decisions and make their wishes known in advance through living wills and similar legal documents. But when House Democrats proposed last year to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, it touched off a wave of suspicion and anger.

Opponents said end-of-life planning should be left to families, while proponents said doctors’ advice was a basic element of health care.

Prominent Republicans singled it out as a glaring example of government overreach. Palin’s use of the phrase “death panels” solidified GOP opposition to the health care bill.

From Newser, ‘Death Panels’ Return: Obama Enacts End-of-Life Planning:

Sarah Palin’s “death panels” are back. The brouhaha surrounding end-of-life counseling forced Democrats to cut it from health care reform, but now President Obama is quietly adding the same policy to Medicare by rewriting regulations, reports the New York Times. Under the new policy, beginning Jan. 1 the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive measures.

Health reform authorized Medicare to pay for annual wellness visits; the new regulation tacks on coverage for “voluntary advance care planning” to that visit. “Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life,” predicts the leader of a religious ministry opposed to the proposals. However, Democrat Earl Blumenauer, the author of the original end-of-life proposal, says it will allow better dialogue between patients and their doctors.

There’s this chilling report from Peter Ferrara at American Spectator, The Death Panel’s First Murder:

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked its regulatory approval of the drug Avastin to treat late stage, metastatic breast cancer. Each year, the practicing oncologists chosen by 17,500 American women to save them from their life-threatening, heavily progressed cancer prescribe Avastin to treat them.

The FDA explained that it was revoking approval of the drug for that use because it decided that the drug does not provide “a sufficient benefit in slowing disease progression to outweigh the significant risk to patients.” Risk? The drug is prescribed for women who are otherwise going to die from cancer unless the drug saves them at least for a time. The far greater risk to these women is from the FDA, not the drug.

As The Wall Street Journal said last Friday in response to the FDA’s explanation:

Ponder that [word] “sufficient.” The agency is substituting its own judgment about clinical meaningfulness for those of practicing oncologists and terminally ill cancer patients.

That FDA judgment was determined last summer by an internal agency panel of 13 experts, only two of whom were breast cancer oncologists, and none of whom were breast cancer patients.

From Human Events, Return of the Death Panel:

The New York Times ran a fascinating Christmas Day story online, to appear in today’s print edition, about the return of the “death panels” for ObamaCare. The term comes from a famous Sarah Palin Facebook post from 2009, in which she said:

“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.”

Palin’s conclusion flows logically from Sowell’s observation. Government control of anything equals rationing, pure and simple: the use of compulsive force to divide a limited resource, with no input from the recipients beyond the occasional opportunity to voice their displeasure during elections. If health care will be rationed, the most critical care will be rationed most severely, since it has the most restricted supply.

Palin was able to shame the Democrats into dropping aggressive end-of-life counseling from ObamaCare during passage, but like everything else about the most disastrous bill of the modern era, it was a lie. The Times approvingly reports that the Administration is quietly restoring these provisions through regulation, specifically a Medicare policy that will “pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.” And just who will be writing those “advance directives?” I’d say the odds of this Orwellian government naming it the “Life Panel” are better than even.

The new policy pays doctors to conduct “voluntary advance care planning to discuss end-of-life treatment” during annual checkups. Dr. Maria J. Silveira of the University of Michigan describes the sort of question doctors might ask: “If you have another heart attack and your heart stops beating, would you want us to try to restart it? Do you want to go on a breathing machine for the rest of your life? When the time comes, do you want us to use technology to try and delay your death?”

Just imagine how future directives will shape the way these questions are asked, as the utterly bankrupt ObamaCare system desperately tries to shift resources away from expensive end-of-life care… followed by the directive to abandon care entirely, based on “quality of life” equations that will become increasingly harsh for anyone who isn’t a member of the political elite.

[...]

Memo to Democrats: Your days of running our lives through secret meetings are over. If people like Palin and the blogging “Army of Davids” don’t expose you, the new Republican House majority will do it with subpoenas. We’ve had our fill of wonderful plans that require unquestioning obedience from citizens who aren’t smart enough to understand their true magnificence. I wonder how many more little surprises oversight committees will find crawling quietly around in the dark underbelly of ObamaCare, once they turn their flashlights on the aura of secrecy and deception surrounding this misbegotten bill. Let us kill it quickly through defunding, and put people like Earl Blumenauer under oath to learn what else they’ve been doing behind our backs, while we wait for someone to take the veto pen away from Obama in 2012.

Categories: Government, Health, Social and Political Climate
Tags: America's health care, American health care, attack Sarah Palin, Avastin, Barack Obama, Congress, conservative bashing, death panel, death panels, Democrats, Earl Blumenauer, end-of-life counseling, federal government, government-run health care, government-run healthcare, health care, left-wing lies, left-wing media, leftwing lies, liberal, liberal lies, lies, media lies, Medicare, nationalized health care, ObamaCare, Palin attack, Palin attacks, Pres. Obama, Republicans, Sarah Palin, socialized health care, socialized medicine, Team Obama, universal health care