Sarah Palin and Death Panels

A brief review of What Sarah Palin actually said about "death panels", at the The Weekly Standard.

Let's take a look at what Palin actually wrote in her original August 7 post:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

It is perfectly clear that Palin is talking about rationing in general. She specifically made the argument that the government's refusing to pay the cost of health care will lead to rationing care, and she also wrote that her "baby with Down Syndrome" could be affected by such rationing. How would "end-of-life counseling" for the elderly cause the death of a disabled baby?

Obama himself acknowledged at an August 11 townhall that the "underlying argument" made by Palin was that his health care bill would "mean rationing of care":
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If Obama recognized Palin was talking about rationing of care, why can't Politifact and other journalists understand that as well? On August 12, Palin responded to Obama and made an argument that the end-of-life counseling provisions could sway the decisions of the elderly. She quoted Charles Lane, who wrote: "So when Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) denies that Section 1233 would 'place senior citizens in situations where they feel pressured to sign end-of-life directives that they would not otherwise sign,' I don’t think he’s being realistic." Feel free to disagree with that argument, but it's not a lie.

It may have been a mistake to emphasize this one provision too much. There were other provisions--like the unelected Medicare cutting panel--that would more clearly cause rationing. And most important is the broader argument that Obama's big-government program cannot add 30 million people to the health care system and slash hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare without causing rationing of care. Obamacare will put stress on the health care system, which will lead to delayed care.

Delayed care is denied care, and denied care will cause deaths. Conservatives have made this argument throughout the debate on Obamacare (for example, see Matthew Continetti and Ramesh Ponnuru). Tom Coburn addressed rationing in Obamacare in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.