Prof. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has an excellent piece today on the latest media hullabaloo over Sarah Palin's comments on Obamacare. As is generally the case, Palin's words create a media maelstrom of criticism while the lefty blogosphere has fodder for more crazed attacks against their favorite target. Legal Insurrection has all the latest pejoratives trotted out to paint Palin with the "crazy brush."
The fury stems from a statment on Palin's facebook page where she issued a statement on the current health care debate. Palin uses the words "death panel" to describe the board that ultimately decides what care is covered for whom and at what stage of life. Legal Insurrection has a PDF of Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel's paper he co-authored titled, "Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions." Dr. Emmanuel, brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, is also a special adviser to the budget director, Peter R. Orszag. In this paper Emmanuel proposes a "Complete Lives System" of resource allocation, or rationing of scarce medical resources. There are five principles incorporated in the proposed rationing theory, that favors the young, considers prognosis and when all things are otherwise equal in times of crisis uses a lottery and instrumental value to determine who gets treatment.
In other words it is a guideline for who gets treatment, thumbs up, thumbs down. Jake Tapper gives an overall thumbs down to Palin's statement but sees more reason in Sowell's and cites from his book:
"the actual consequences of government-controlled medical care is not a pretty picture, however inspiring the rhetoric that accompanies it. ... Many people do not understand that it is not just a question of whether government bureaucrats will agree to pay for particular medical treatments. The same government-control mindset that decides what should and should not be paid for can also decide that the medical technology or pharmaceutical drugs that they control should not be for sale to those who are willing to pay their own money."
Though Tapper sees this a more reasoned argument he goes on to wonder if Sowell's arguments fails to "emphasize that health care insurance company bureaucrats already are making such decisions. Ah, here's the rub, since the advent of Medicare & Medicaid the bureaucrats have been leaning heavily toward giving "the operation instead of the painkiller, as the President might say. The cadillac health insurance programs and "great society" utopian ideal of care for all has led to a whole lot of thumbs up, thumbs down... not so much. Now with an aging boomer population the government with an entitlement carrying an $85.6 trillion unfunded liability, is going to have to start giving some serious thumbs down. Palin's "death panel" euphamism is likely a bit closer to what is ahead than we're "just going to have to give up paying for things that don't make us healthier."
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