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If you want to take a stomach-churning ride on a loop-the-loop, you don’t have to go to the state fair – just plug-in to the loony attacks right-wingers have launched against Barack Obama’s health-care reform plan.
You’ll shriek as they take you on astonishing flights of fantasy. For example, did you know that the diabolical Obama is a secret socialist who is plotting a full-scale “government takeover” of health care, including putting Medicare under government control?
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Far more blood-curdling, though, is what right-wingers have uncovered in the President’s reform legislation. Buried on page 425 of the bill is a demonic, bone-chilling provision to create a federal “death panel,” which will be empowered to kill old folks and people with disabilities. Impossible, you scoff? Well, none other than Sarah Palin says it’s so. The elderly and incapacitated, Palin recently revealed, “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide… whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system,” concluded the Sainted Sarah, “is downright evil.”
Indeed it is, and it would terrify us all – if one iota of Palin’s statement was true.
Luckily, it’s not. The provision on page 425 has nothing to do with a “death panel.” It simply promotes the common sense idea that folks should have “living wills” and other advance instructions for how they choose to be treated when their inevitable time of death approaches. This end-of-life provision didn’t even come from Obama or a Democrat. It was put into the bill by Johnny Isakson – a Republican, pro-life senator from Georgia. Isakson says that Palin’s interpretation of the provision is: “nuts.”
But on the right-wing loop-the-loop, such realities are not allowed to interfere with a good political ride.
“Health Care Realities,” The New York Times,” July 31, 2009.
“Death panel” Architect a pro-life Republican from Georgia?” www.southernstudies.org , August 10, 2009.
“Is the Government Going to Euthanize your Grandmother? An Interview With Sen. Johnny Isakson,” www.washingtonpost.com, August 10, 2009.