The Wall Street Journal revisits the Death Panel debate, now that the administration has decided to introduce coverage for end of life counseling in Medicare. Congress explicitly rejected this in ObamaCare.
On Sunday, Robert Pear reported in the New York Times that Medicare will now pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling as part of seniors' annual physicals. A similar provision was originally included in ObamaCare, but Democrats stripped it out amid the death panel furor. Now Medicare will enact the same policy through regulation.
We hadn't heard about this development until Mr. Pear's story, but evidently Medicare tried to prevent the change from becoming public knowledge. The provision is buried in thousands of Federal Register pages setting Medicare's hospital and physician price controls for 2011 and concludes that such consultations count as a form of preventative care.
The office of Oregon Democrat Earl Blumenauer, the author of the original rider who then lobbied Medicare to cover the service, sent an email to supporters cheering this "victory" but asked that they not tell anyone for fear of perpetuating "the 'death panel' myth." The email added that "Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch."
But end of life counseling is not what Death Panels are all about, anyway. Here's what Sarah Palin had to say about Death Panels on her Facebook page.
My original comments concerned statements made by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy advisor to President Obama and the brother of the President’s chief of staff. Dr. Emanuel has written that some medical services should not be guaranteed to those “who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens....An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” [10] Dr. Emanuel has also advocated basing medical decisions on a system which “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.” [11]
Death Panels refer to those bureaucratic decision makers who will say what ObamaCare will cover and what it won't, and who will base their decisions in part on the age of the patient. End of life counseling may be troubling to some, but that's not the big deal. And the Journal agrees.
The real death panel myth is that the term ever had anything to do with something so potentially beneficial. We wrote at the time that Sarah Palin's coinage was sensationalistic, but it was meant to illustrate a larger truth about a world of finite resources and infinite entitlement wants.
Under highly centralized national health care, the government inevitably makes cost-minded judgments about what types of care are "best" for society at large, and the standardized treatments it prescribes inevitably steal life-saving options from individual patients. This is precisely why many liberals like former White House budget director Peter Orszag support government-run health care to control costs: Technocrats in government can then decide who gets Avastin for cancer, say, and who doesn't.
Deception has always been key to the progressive argument. Progressives desperately hope that distorting the debate with straw man arguments will fool the majority into going along with them. End of life counseling is not the big issue. Bureaucratic decisions about coverage that are based age and health of the patient are.
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