Obama’s Doctor Cousin: Palin Was Right
Dr. Milton Wolf, who is a second cousin to Barack Obama, is opposed to Obamacare. Here’s his latest op-ed in the Washington Times – “Lies, Damn Lies, and Death Panels”:
The liberal intelligentsia, prisoners of their own conditioned reflex response, mocked Sarah Palin when she warned America in a Facebook post of the Obamacare death panels. The excitable Keith Olbermann even crowned it a 2009 “Lie of the Year.” Specifically, the ex-governor of Alaska referred to the Advance Care Planning Consultation provision in the Affordable Care Act, Section 1233 of H.R. 3200, which specifically called to pay doctors to discuss – some say encourage – withholding end-of-life care with their elderly patients once every five years. The White House denied impropriety but removed the provision when fellow Democrats balked. Only then did the bill pass by a single vote.
The liberal talking class continued to mock Mrs. Palin and her supposedly mythical death panels, that is, until liberal icon and former Enron adviser Paul Krugman let the cat out of the bag that death panels are indeed a reality and, in his ghoulish vision, killing off senior citizens and taxing the survivors is a solution to America’s debt problem: “Some years down the pike, we’re going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes.” This gives a chilling new meaning to death and taxes. Suddenly the inharmonious left fell silent.
Read the rest at conservatives4palin.com
Obama’s One Man Death Panel
Sarah Palin warned people about this a year ago and was vilified for it. Now it has coming to pass – Obama has named a new head of Medicare, Harvard’s Dr. Donald Berwick, who thinks there is “better use” for funds than to spend it on lifesaving drugs and procedures for the elderly:
He [Berwick] has praised the U.K’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which he says has “developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn.”
Last year, the Orwellian-named NICE unveiled plans to cut annual steroid injections for severe back pain to 3,000 from 60,000. “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospital’s Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph…
If Berwick wants to imitate Britain’s model, perhaps he can explain why breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate while in Britain it’s almost double at 46. Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it; in Britain it kills 57% of those it strikes.
“Donald Berwick is a one-man death panel,” said David O’Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee. “While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama’s rationing czar.”
Berwick has opined: “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit (new drug or medical intervention) is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.”
Sounds like Death Panels to me. Read the full article at IBD: “The President’s One-Man Death Panel“
Palin Was Right. Again.
Alan Reynolds of the Cato Insititute wrote about the criticism that was leveled against Governor Palin’s term “death panel” and the ruckus it caused. Specifically, he took apart PolitiFact’s criticism and how the “death panel” term evolved in the MSM. He opines:
The claim that Governor Palin confused one-on-one counseling between doctors and patients with any sort of “panel” was always ridiculous on its face. Indeed, that claim should itself have been a leading candidate for “Lie of the Year.” Yet Palin’s critics kept on equating death panels with counseling throughout the year, as though they could not even begin to understand plain English….
The shameless hoax that Palin had confused individual consulting with rationing by a panel was repeated endlessly. By November, the Washington Post was treating this obvious canard as a established fact: “Proposed health-care reform legislation includes a provision that allows Medicare to pay for “end-of-life” counseling for seniors and their families who request it. The provision — which Sarah Palin erroneously described as “death panels” for seniors — nearly derailed President Obama’s health-care initiative.”
Palin wrote: “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 horror of what Palin described is currently being enacted by the Congress – who wish to give us Death Panels in this mess of a health care “reform” bill that’s unconstitutional. Rationing for all, and end-of-life “consultations” for the elderly. Read Reynolds’ piece here.
