Steven Rattner, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, called for “death panels” in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, proving that liberals and the mainstream media were apoplectic when former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin threatened Obamacare would lead to health care rationing because they knew Palin was telling an inconvenient truth.
“We need death panels,” Rattner simply wrote. “ Well, maybe not death panels, exactly, but unless we start allocating health care resources more prudently — rationing, by its proper name — the exploding cost of Medicare will swamp the federal budget.”
Rattner wrote Obamacare “regrettably includes severe restrictions on any reduction in Medicare services or increase in fees to beneficiaries.”
“In 2009, Sarah Palin’s rant about death panels even forced elimination from the bill of a provision to offer end-of-life consultations,” Rattner wrote.
He said “Medicare needs to take a cue from Willie Sutton, who reportedly said he robbed banks because that’s where the money was.”
“The big money in Medicare is not to be found in Mr. Ryan’s competition or Mr. Obama’s innovation, but in reducing the cost of treating people in the last year of life, which consumes more than a quarter of the program’s budget,” Rattner wrote.
According to Rattner, because “no one wants to lose an aging parent,” it is “natural for patients and their families to try every treatment, regardless of expense or efficacy” and that “imposes an enormous societal cost that few other nations have been willing to bear.”
He cites countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that ration care and writes, “at the least, the Independent Payment Advisory Board should be allowed to offer changes in services and costs. We may shrink from such stomach-wrenching choices, but they are inescapable.”
Before the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Obamacare by deeming it a tax, Palin wrote in a Facebook post, “I reiterate what I wrote in my first post on this topic nearly three years ago. I stand by everything I wrote in that warning to my fellow Americans because what was true then is true now, and it will remain true as we hear what the Supreme Court has to say.”
Palin said even though her original post was substantive and lengthy, her detractors only read two words of it: “death panel.”
“Though I was called a liar for calling it like it is, many of these accusers finally saw that Obamacare did in fact create a panel of faceless bureaucrats who have the power to make life and death decisions about health care funding,” Palin wrote. “It’s called theIndependent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), and its purpose all along has been to ‘keep costs down’ by actually denying care via price controls and typically inefficient bureaucracy. This subjective rationing of care is what I was writing about in that first post.”
The Conservatives at Breitbart have the full article
