Cecelia says:

Actually, the notion of death panel did not crop up from the fantasies of Sara Palin.

The president himself mention such a panel in an interview he did with the New York Times in which he bemoaned the fact that end of life care accounts for 80% of the nation’s total health care expenditures.

In the interview the president ventured that what is needed is a non-political panel of health care experts and ethicists, who will make non-binding recommendations to terminally ill patients and their families.

http://tinyurl.com/dy5oxg

In the context of a system funding by taxpayers, it is NOT the stuff of fantasy to foresee a time when such a rationing of health care dollars would be beneficial to politicians who do not want to raise taxes at election time. Especially in a context of an aging population like ours. Especially within a context of the 80% of all heal care expenditures number.

It’s a PERTINENT consumer question to ask if such non-binding recommendations from the panel envisioned by Pres. Obama (see link — page 2) would surely go from being “This is how much tax payer money you’re using by fighting for time” to “How could you use this much public money in a lost fight for time?”.

It’s also a pertinent consumer question to ask if the long term goal of the Democrats is to ultimately have a single-payer system, if the bills on the table now are there to facilitate this, and to ask this question REGARDLESS of the actual wording in any current Democratic health care bill.

The media would have no problem discerning this and would never stoop to calling such discussions “lies” and “misinformation” if the legislation in question was school voucher legislation.

In a hypothetical scenario of school voucher legislation being on the table the media would have NO difficulty with recognizing the validity of questioning whether the long term intent of such a program was to do away with public education altogether. They’d recognize the pertinence of THAT question in the case of school vouchers, REGARDLESS of ANY assurances to the contrary within the written voucher legislation.

It’s quite a disingenuous discussion these media champions of health care legislation have wanted so desparately to steer us in. There desire for control in this debate has made them willing adversaries with many in their audience.

By vilifying dissenters as racist clods and characterizing certain questions and prognostications as solely being lies and propaganda, they’ve done their best to devalue any of the normal analysis done by diligent and perceptive consumers.