Republicans were going to have death commissions. Heres how they work. You beg for health care. We say no.
Brilliant! This is the kind of stuff Democrats should have been coming out with months ago to prepare for the onslaught of Limbaugh and others.
Robert Wright brings up a great point on The Daily Dish:
In Palin’s fantasy, the death-panel “bureaucrats” were going to pick winners and losers based on a judgment about their “level of productivity in society.” Well, if you view income as a gauge of a person’s productivity in society—and God knows there are Republicans who do—then the quality of health care is already correlated with “productivity in society.” Obama’s plan, by making health care more affordable to lower income people, would make that less true.
Very good thing to keep in mind as you see those media clips of people (presumably those who already are insured) speaking out against health care reform:
I’m pretty sick of hearing rich-ass white people complain about health care reform leaving them out to die. As fucking if.
The Daily Kos goes after Politico for the way that it handled Palin’s claim over the health care plan:
Seriously? Seriously?
Yes, seriously. It falls to Politico to take a story about a national figure making up wholesale a crooked and ridiculous story about how Democratic “Death Panels” are coming after her disabled child if we dare reform healthcare, and turn it into an absolutely straight news story.Well done, Politico. Absolutely masterful. I couldnt come up with a more embarrassing example of the national political media as lazy, stupid, worse-than-useless prop if I tried.
As the Daily Kos points out it should not be too much to ask for an institution like Politico to point out how blatantly ignorant and idiotic Palin’s statement is. Instead of doing so though they simply quote her and lend a ounce of credibility to her claim.
Matthew Yglesias today rebuts this statistic about life expectancy in the Netherlands versus the United States:
At birth, someone living in the Netherlands can expect to live 2.35 years longer than someone born in the US, but at age 65, the difference is reversed, and someone living in the US can expect to live 0.4 years longer than someone living in the Netherlands. This difference can be explained by assuming that semi-socialized health care is better for young and worse for old people, or, at least as likely, different policies are not the main cause of the difference. [emphasis original]
Yglesias writes that:
But insofar as we want to examine the health care issue, both sides of this factoid support socialism. Dutch people of all ages enjoy a quasi-socialized system of health insurance provision (by European standards, there’s a lot of private sector involvement in Dutch health care). Americans under the age of 65 participate in an overwhelmingly private sector health insurance market. But Americans over the age of 65 participate in a Canadian-style national health insurance scheme known as Medicare. The data, if we want to take it seriously, indicates that the Dutch system is better than private sector medicine but worse than Medicare and tends to support a “Medicare for all” approach.
This reminds me of the interview that John Stewart did with Bill Kristol in which he gets Kristol to admit the supremacy of the government-run military health care system.
It just seems so blatantly hypocritical for people to extol the virtues of Medicare and military health insurance and yet condone a public option for health care. Despite this we’re still having to rely upon people like Yglesias and Stewart to point out this hypocrisy. This should be what the Democrats do if they really want this plan to pass.
