The left is calling Sarah Palin’s “death panel” the “lie of the year.” In fact, the lie of the year is that ObamaCare doesn’t have death panel. In fact, Harry Reid inserted language into his manager’s amendment making the death panel almost impossible to overturn by a future Congress.
In the latest note on her Facebook page, Palin blasted the shady backroom deals made by Harry Reid and the democrats, and basically said “I told you so” regarding the death panel.
Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C. No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:
“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.”
In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?
The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill’s calculations call for a reduction in Medicare’s spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker: ….
The only possible way they can keep costs down is to ration care. And the ones doing the rationing will be unelected bureaucrats. Of course, politicians and their families will continue to receive the best care our money can buy for them. But the rest of us will be pushed into a system run by political appointees with the power to make our health care decisions for us, and deciding if we’re worth the expense of life saving treatment.
Via memeorandum
Recent Comments