Florida Dem Runs on Death Panel Platform

WEST PALM BEACH — Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Maurice Ferre says the U.S. spends an "absurd" amount on end-of-life care and should gradually move to a universal health system in which the government controls costs by setting prices for medical procedures and capping expenditures based on age and medical condition.

Speaking to The Palm Beach Post editorial board today, Ferre said he would have voted for the health care overhaul approved by Congress and signed by President Obama this year as "a step in the right direction." He later said the "Medicare-for-everyone" system he favors should be phased in over about 25 years.

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Was Sarah Palin Right All Along?

It's alive! End-of-life counseling in health bill By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR The Medicare end-of-life planning provision that 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said was tantamount to 'death panels' for seniors is staying in the latest Democratic health care bill unveiled Thursday. The provision allows Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling to help beneficiaries deal with the complex and painful decisions families face when a loved one is approaching death. For years, federal laws and policies have encouraged Americans to think ahead about end-of-life decisions, and make their wishes known in advance through living wills and similar legal documents. But when House Democrats proposed this summer to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, it touched off a wave of suspicion and anger. Prominent Republicans singled it out as a glaring example of government overreach. Read the rest at Big Government

Think there are still no death panels? Think again.

Sarah Palin was mocked and criticized when she likened some language in the health care reform bill as "death panels", yet democrat law makers removed the language from the bill. Even though nobody has asked how they removed something that supposedly never existed, it seems that the language is already in another bill, on page 151, called HR 1, which contains a massive $1.1 billion to Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research.

The FCCCER is the product of former Health and Human Services nominee, Tom Daschle. However, before the bill was passed, former Lieutenant governor of New York, Betsy McCaughey wrote about it in length. The purpose of this council, according to Tom Daschle and by extension President Obama's, is to allow an unelected, bureaucratic body to make the rough decisions of rationing health care. Thus, Daschle argues that Americans should be more like sheeple in Europe who meekly accepts "hopeless diagnoses."

McCaughey states:

Daschle says health-care reform "will not be pain free." Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them.

And guess who is on this council? Why, none other than Ezekiel Emanuel. He tries to justify his position by asserting:

Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.

I have always said that the language in the 1017 page monstrosity is not what people should be worried about, but, what language is not in it. The bill is vague at best and that's for a reason. If this gets passed, then the bill will have to be implemented by bureaucrats that will have to insert regulations to make it function and this is where the nightmare is.

The President's Regulatory czar, Cass Sustein is going to play a huge role defining what the government's role will be in controlling medical care. Sustein wrote a paper in 2003 for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies arguing that life varies in value. To be more specific, Sustein pushes the idea of "quality adjusted life years", which is a government statistic that gives preference to human life. What this means is that if the government decides that a person's life is not worth living, then it's the duty of the individual to come to terms with it and die in order to free up welfare payments for the young and strong.

So, if you think that there still isn't any "death panels", think again. It was already passed.