If Congress and the White House were to create “death panels” to decide who lives and who dies, just imagine the president’s cabinet meetings.
The suits are arrayed around the big table. Papers are shuffled. Good-mornings and knowing chuckles are exchanged. The powerful often take comfort in shared knowing chuckles. Then the Secretary of Death Panels enters the room. Throats are cleared. Nervous silence prevails. The president brings his Sec. of DP a cup of coffee. The Death Czar has stroke. He can decide whether you die from one or not.
Even arguments over farm policy would become life or death matters, and not just for farmers or food-eaters, i.e., us. The Secretary of Agriculture, who can only hope the Sec. of DP wasn’t raised among the amber waves of grain, would be as perpetually vulnerable as grapefruit to a freeze.
Democrats have spent so much time putting the lie to the death-panel claim of big insurance, its lawmaker lackeys and their grassdupes, that we’ve failed to consider the proposal on its merits. I think President Obama should deeply consider the possibilities before he addresses Congress this week.
Has anyone thought through the partisan advantage this might afford Democrats in the future? Would Americans ever again vote Republican if they think Dick Cheney is going to get anywhere near the Death Panel Doomsday Device?
Harry Whittington will become a progressive blogger.
Do you know how much rich Americans contribute to presidential candidates on the hopes they will be named Ambassador to the Court of St. James? Leaving aside the question of why they would pay to go live amongst the rascals we ran out of here at the end of our musket barrels, appointment to the Dark Office would be way cooler. How much would the wannabes pull from their pockets if such an appointment were a possibility?
Fantasies of retribution would abound among DP applicants. The 12-year-old who tripped you in the hall as you returned to your sixth-grade class from the playground: he’s a dead man. Death stalks the until-now invisible insurance company bean counter who sold your beans down the river and denied you that root canal you needed.
America’s corporate chieftains would quake, finally. Yea, it might make you feel powerful that you control the world’s gasoline supplies or fiber optic lifelines, but the damned Death Czar’s got it all over you. So you drop gas prices in his neighborhood to 50 cents a gallon. You give him premium cable channels for free. If you’re a banker, you give him a Cross pen and pencil set when he makes a deposit. This ritual becomes known in the financial sector as keeping one’s fingers Crossed.
The Death Panel is the ultimate triangulating policy initiative. By god, it’s positively conservative. We could return America to its Golden Age.
But you know how the Death Czar could really enhance his power? By never using it. Fear would spread across the land like smoke from the wildfires of California if the DP could turn his death-ray on anyone he chooses, but didn’t. “What,” we would whisper, “is he up to?”
And Congress? Say goodbye to gridlock. You think Republicans would filibuster the initiatives of the Sec. of DP’s party? The term “yes men” takes on new meaning. Civility will be restored.
If the Democrats had any real think tanks like the Republicans do we would have already thought of the extraordinary possibilities of the death panel proposal. Alas, we do not. So, I offer the above as a public service.
I know we are all wrapped up at the moment in the effort to end the unnecessary death and suffering caused by our current health care system, and that’s a noble pursuit. Right now, our Republican opponents tell us that the death and suffering among Americans priced out of health care is necessary if the free market is to remain free and America is to remain America. Necessary? We should pause and reflect. Oh, how the word “necessary” will turn heads in the corridors of power when it falls from the lips of the Secretary of Death
“Right now, our Republican opponents tell us that the death and suffering among Americans priced out of health care is necessary if the free market is to remain free and America is to remain America.”
Republicans are saying no such thing. They are in favor of health care reform – just not government take over… there is a huge difference between the two.
I think you’ve also blown the “Death Czar” thing WAY out of proportion. The language for that provision is in the House as well as the Senate bill. In fact, after vehemently denying that it was there for so long, they conceded to remove it. Well, if it wasn’t there in the first place, then what was there to remove? Obama is proposing a 500 Billion dollar cut from Medicare and you don’t think that the elderly won’t be encouraged, during their end of life counseling (that is MANDATORY) every 5 years, to help save costs and not have the procedure they need, or just be told outright that that procedure isn’t available to them because of the Cost Benefit Analysis says they can’t. Its very utopitarian of you to believe that by the government taking over healthcare, that your taxes won’t go up, everyone will be covered under a wonderful insurance policy, everyone will get any/all treatments they want/need, healthcare won’t be rationed and we will all meet our prince charming and ride into the sunset.
The President has no idea how this plan will be paid for. His projection for HIS spending was off by nearly 2 Trillion dollars. The government can’t even reimburse the car dealerships that filed claims for cash for clunkers, in a timely manner, Medicare, Medicaid and the Post Office are bankrupt, and I’m supposed to happily go along with this healthcare farce because I should have all the confidence in the world that my government is going to be fiscally responsible with my tax dollars, as they have so far. Well, maybe if I were a sheep!
I love this country and will not let it be sold off little by little. What happened to “If you can’t afford it, you can’t have it”. Get off the sense of entitlement. This is the land of opportunity.
The reason “death panel” talk is able to exist today is because of the day news reporting died and entertainment took its place. These dog and pony shows by Palin, Beck and the like would have never received an ounce of homage back in the day of Cronkite. If anything should be learned from the insanity of today it should be that news centers turned profit centers cause the rapid demise of an intellectual society.
This has nothing to do with the media… the bills speak for themselves. And, speaking of the mainstream media… they aren’t doing their jobs very well.
I so enjoy seeing a Republican say, “If you can’t afford it, you can’t have it.” I think that’s a capital idea (pun intended). Let’s start with wars … if you can’t pay for ‘em you can’t start ‘em.
And to see that same poster regurgitate every single talking-point with which those mighty intellectuals Glenn Beck & Rush Limbaugh, with their 100% fact-free tirades, have inundated the airwaves and then proclaim that she is not a sheep almost had me rolling in the aisles!
Will it ever make a scintilla of difference if we keep trying to explain to some folks that ‘Big Gummint Takeover’ is NOT, nor has it been part of any plan at all? Not one single, solitary plan has any intent of telling anyone what they can charge or what they must do. The dread ‘single payer’ or public option is just that, an OPTION … one which anyone is free to accept or not at their own, personal discretion. There are guidelines in place designed to verify quality of care in order to qualify for payment.
It also gets tiresome trying to convince the determinedly unconvinceable that there is no MANDATORY ‘end of life’ counseling. The provision says that IF you want it, it will be paid for, as long as your doctor provides you with information that meets medical community approved standards.
In point of fact, what we truly can NOT afford is the status quo, of which the Republican party, which looks more and more like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the insurance lobby, is so fond.
But we know that this is not really about ‘Big Gummint’ or health care reform or ‘Death Panels’ or internment camps for Republicans. It’s about politics, unpure and simple. A particularly virulent strain of Republicans announced in no uncertain terms that they are determined to bring President Obama down and that they are planning to use his attempt to institute long-overdue health care reform to do it. All else is the Pavlovian whistle of fear and loathing that the Republicans have used with such success to set their pets a-drooling. Obviously it still works.