Hmmmm. Looks like a lot of left-leaning bloggers will be eating crow, since Chuck Grassley, one of the leading Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, says that end-of-life provisions have been removed from the Senate’s version of ObamaCare,
Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, who is working with Finance Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus on a health care compromise, has just issued a statement saying that concerns about end-of-life issues in the House health care bill are entirely legitimate. In addition, Grassley says the Finance Committee has “dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely” because of those fears and also because of concerns that they could be “implemented incorrectly.” Grassley’s statement:
The bill passed by the House committees is so poorly cobbled together that it will have all kinds of unintended consequences, including making taxpayers fund health care subsidies for illegal immigrants. On the end-of-life issue, there’s a big difference between a simple educational campaign, as some advocates want, and the way the House committee-passed bill pays physicians to advise patients about end of life care and rates physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care, while at the same time creating a government-run program that is likely to lead to the rationing of care for everyone. On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options. That methodical approach continues. We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly. Maybe others can defend a bill like the Pelosi bill that leaves major issues open to interpretation, but I can’t.
In other words, the end-of-life provisions could have lead to “death panels”….just like Palin said.
Makes sense, really. When you start rationing care – as you almost invariably do under any universal single payer health care system – then you start taking into account things like “how many useful years does this person have left?” And you start considering that giving health care to old people who won’t be working and producing tax revenue isn’t worth it. You start measuring the value of a person’s life on how much revenue they can generate for the state. Then you end up with the death panels Palin warned about. Where did she get such a silly idea? Probably from Oregon, where exactly that sort of thing has already happened via Oregon’s state-run health care system.
Once again, conservatives were right, and the leftie blogs were wrong. I’m starting to detect a trend here.
Tags: euthanasia, Healthcare, Politics
