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