Day By Day

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Berwick and the Death Panels

Stuart Schwartz writing in the American Thinker notes that Sarah Palin, with her invocation of "death panels", fundamentally changed the tone of the debate over Obamacare.
[Palin] cut to the heart of Obamacare a year ago, slashing through the professor-speak and government gobbledygook with a searing summary on Facebook of its bottom line: "death panels." With those words, the grounds for debate had shifted, the mainstream media ideological blackout was circumvented....
Not only was Palin's pronouncement a game-changer, it was prescient. Although Sarah was attacked viciously and vehemently by the MSM her prediction has been borne out by the recent appointment of Harvard's Dr. Donald Berwick to oversee the implementation of Obamacare. 
The Harvard health specialist's job is to transform Medicare, to make the primary medical insurance system for seniors into an instrument of social policy, to take wealth and years from seniors and redistribute them to favored segments of the population. This is not about health care, and it is especially not about seniors; rather, it is all about the social engineering.
Sarah Palin was right....

 Read it here.


Schwartz's assessment may be a bit over the top in its rhetoric, but the point he makes is valid. The implementation of Obamacare, as it is envisioned by Dr. Berwick and his associates, will indeed result in the rationing of health care resources available to senior citizens and will produce a redistribution of those resources away from seniors toward politically favored groups designated by government panels as being more valuable to society. Bureaucrats will be making fundamental health care decisions for us all, and when we consider their effect on senior citizens, the term "death panels" is by no means inappropriate.

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