The REAL Death Panel

So, does everyone remember the big health care debate our mighty nation endured just a few short months ago?

Or were we just watching Dancing with the latest American Idol?

As you may recall, there was a portion of the proposed health care bill that provided for end-of-life counseling for those who were facing the inevitable.

The vaunted and lovely Sarah Palin, the one who is the alleged Republican front runner for the 2012 Presidential election, and highly paid shill under contract with Fox News, said that this amounted to "death panels."

Now we all know that this was a gross exaggeration on her part.

We do, right?

The Huffington Post reported in August of '09 that former Gov. P's opinion of our impeding doom was this:

"...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."

Sarah is also a Jan Brewer fan.

Ahem.

In yesterday's New York Times, I learned that in Arizona (Brewer Country to you and me,) there actually ARE death panels:

"Effective at the beginning of October, Arizona stopped financing certain transplant operations under the state’s version of Medicaid. Many doctors say the decision amounts to a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them."

"Organ transplants are already the subject of a web of regulations, which do not guarantee that everyone in need of a life-saving organ will receive one. But Arizona’s transplant specialists are alarmed that patients who were in line to receive transplants one day were, after the state’s budget cuts to its Medicaid program, ruled ineligible the next — unless they raised the money themselves."

So, let's review: In Arizona, if you are poor and in need of a life-saving transplant, you will die.

Since the most recent mid-term elections, Republicans have been screaming that the American people have firmly spoken and that there is now a mandate (see Republican agenda) that needs to be adhered to.

This is how far we have fallen.

So it goes...