Obama Death Panels

After Slamming Palin, NY Times Excited for Up Coming Obama Death Panels

 By Warner Todd Huston
For The New York Times, Steven Ratner had to admit last month that he was pretty darned excited for those Obamacare death panels to get started. “WE need death panels,” he said on September 16. This from the same paper that in 2009 attacked Gov. Sarah Palin for her rhetoric and an Old Media establishment that gave Palin a “lie of the year” award for her claim that Obamacare death panels were coming.

The Times sudden appreciation of death panels isn’t the only bit of hypocrisy revealed in Ratner’s article. His very first paragraph wallows in rank hypocrisy.

Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.

So, not only is Ratner suddenly looking forward to the very death panels his paper mocked Palin for alerting us all to back in 2009, but he’s now openly admitting that the costs of Obamacare will skyrocket unless we start rationing care and telling some people they aren’t allowed to have health saving procedures!

Doesn’t this paragraph prove out what conservatives have been saying about Obamacare since day one? That there will be rationing, that some government agency will be deciding who will live and who will die, that the costs will be ruinous, and that the Democrat’s claims that “everyone will get care” is an outright lie — this is what we’ve been saying from the beginning.

Yet, we were told by the Times and Democrats that no rationing was in the offing. We were told we could keep our doctors if we like them. We were sold all sorts of rosy scenarios telling us how great Obamacare would be and the Times led the charge to convince America to acquiesce to Obamacare.
Now that the mess is passed and soon to go into effect, here is Ratner admitting that everything conservatives said was right.

The fact is, Obamacare does feature a death panel-like system. Tom Blummer sums it up nicely:
Enter the Independent Payment Advisory Board. ObamaCare deliberately insulated it from normal Congressional oversight and approval (its word is law unless Congress acts; IPAB shouldn’t be able act unless Congress approves its budget and priorities). By dictating overall spending levels, IPAB will restrict care without knowing who they’re doing it to, leaving the dirty work of deciding exactly who should and shouldn’t receive care to hospitals and other medical providers. Consider it death panel outsourcing. You can rest assured that providers will get the latest and greatest advice from the likes of “Zeke the Bleak” Emanuel and others with a utilitarian view of humanity on implementing “quality-adjusted life year system” and other schemes to decide who is unworthy of medical attention up to and including continued life.

Blummer also asked if Politifact was now going to vacate its dubious award to Palin for the Lie of The Year 2009 for her death panel comment?

With Ratner essentially admitting that rationing is a must and that rationing means some won’t get life saving care, it is Politifact itself that should be awarded the “lie of the year” award.