The Obama Death Panel "Rumors" - The Times Looks Everywhere But The Mirror

The always-reliable NY Times probes deeply into the question of why these death panel rumors swirl around Obama, helpfully likening them to the rumors about Obama being a Muslim or not an American:

False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots
By JIM RUTENBERG and JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.

Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

Let's see - as candidate and President Obama has talked endlessly about the need to reduce health care costs, although his plans for doing so are opaque.

And in the course of talking about runaway costs and ways to reduce them, Obama actually advocated end-of-life panels issuing voluntary guidelines with Timesman David Leonhardt, as reported in the Times; by way of introduction, Obama had been discussing the story of his grandmother, who was terminally ill with cancer when she had an expensive hip replacement procedure so that she would not be bed-ridden for the last three to nine months of her life:

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

LEONHARDT: So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

So as of April 2009 Obama himself expected the final legislation to include some sort of group (but NOT a "death panel"!) that would produce voluntary guidelines for end of life care with an eye towards saving money. 

And now Obama is plagued by scurrilous rumors that his legislation will include groups that issue guidelines for end of life care with the goal of saving money.  Fortunately, the Times has looked everywhere but their own candidate and their own website and firmly concluded that the rumors are false.

That is a characteristically great effort by the Times.  We look forward to their hard-hitting coverage of the latest installment of the John Edwards debacle.

[BELATED PILING ON:  In their own coverage of the Obama interview Peter Baker of the Times wrote this on May 1:

Some conservatives have cited Mr. Obama’s story to make the case that his plan to expand access to health care and reduce costs ultimately will result in rationing, of the kind that might have denied his grandmother the surgery unless she paid the bill on her own.

“To me, Obama is laying out the intellectual case for health care rationing while acknowledging the potential human costs of such a policy,” wrote Matthew Continetti on the Web site of the Weekly Standard magazine. “He’s saying that, in order to contain costs, under a universal health care program his grandmother might have been denied that hip replacement, or forced to pay for it herself. This is the natural consequence of a universal policy, which would bankrupt the country without some form of rationing care.”

Evidently, once Sarah Palin spoke the Times forgot their own interview and their own reporting].

HOW VOLUNTARY?  And how voluntary will these imagined guidelines be?  Doctors that are currently free to prescribe painkillers volunteer not to, to avoid hassles from the DEA.  Mightn't doctors prefer to follow the "voluntary" end-of-life guidelines rather than risk Federal examination of their taxes, expenses, hiring decisions, and payroll?  That would depend in large part on how aggressively the government chose to push the "voluntary" guidelines. 

Based on the current public reaction to these "rumors" I would imagine that the Feds will steer clear of this, for now anyway.

BY WAY OF CONTRAST:  The Wall Street Journal editors think the death panel talk is "over the top" but opines that seniors have a point:

Elderly Americans are turning out in droves to fight ObamaCare, and President Obama is arguing back that they have nothing to worry about. Allow us to referee. While claims about euthanasia and "death panels" are over the top, senior fears have exposed a fundamental truth about what Mr. Obama is proposing: Namely, once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, rationing care is inevitable, and those who have lived the longest will find their care the most restricted.

They do tackle Obama's gramdmother:

Before he got defensive, Mr. Obama was open about this political calculation. He often invokes the experience of his own grandmother, musing whether it was wise for her to receive a hip replacement after a terminal cancer diagnosis. In an April interview with the New York Times, he wondered whether this represented a "sustainable model" for society. He seems to believe these medical issues are all justifiably political questions that government or some panel of philosopher kings can and should decide. No wonder so many seniors rebel at such judgments that they know they could do little to influence, much less change.

Hmm, he "seems to believe these medical issues are all justifiably political questions that government or some panel of philosopher kings can and should decide"?  He did believe some independent (and presumably wise) panel should provide guidance on end-of-life care.

Comments

[bad]

Kim, my grandmother broke her hip in her eighties and was in a nursing home for two years while it healed. She lived another ten years after that. Surgery would have been a much cheaper, quicker fix for everyone.

Of course, that was a long time ago.

[Porchlight]

He's not fit to be anyone's grandson, let alone anyone's President.

That's for damn sure. While he does seem quite human and fatherly toward his daughters, I wouldn't want him as a son or grandson or cousin or nephew. He has always seemed singularly uninterested in his the rest of his family's fate except as regards their usefulness as props in his grand narrative.

[pagar]

Here is an interview with an Aunt of Obama who has lived in the US for decades as an illegal.

She’s been the beneficiary of de facto amnesty for more than three decades. Why shouldn’t she feel entitled to it the rest of her life?

Anyone know any other high placed political figures in the US with an illegal aunt? A aunt who has been illegal all the time he has been in politics.

[Jack]

Obama Goes After Politicians Spreading "Death Panels" Lie At Colorado Town Hall:

"What you can't do, or you can, but you shouldn't do -- is start saying things like we want to set up death panels to pull the plug on grandma." President Obama paused and grew emotional, "First of all, when you make a comment like that, I just lost my grandmother last year... I know what its like to watch somebody you love, who's aging, deteriorate... When you start making arguments like that, that's simply dishonest. Especially when I hear the arguments coming from members of congress in the other party, who, it turns out, sponsored similar provisions!"

According to Huffington Post, Barack said this today.

[bad to the bone]

Ibama is right. They don't want to set up death panels because it was already done in the porkulous bill:

H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, even more commonly known as the Stimulus Bill and aptly dubbed the Porkulus Bill) contains a whopping $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is the brain child of former Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee Tom Daschle. Before the Porkulus Bill passed, Betsy McCaughey, former Lieutenant governor of New York, wrote in detail about the Council's purpose.

LUN

[Neo]

But the bill [H.R. 1 EH AKA "stimulus"] goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.”

[Ignatz]

--First of all, when you make a comment like that, I just lost my grandmother last year...I know what its like to watch somebody you love, who's aging, deteriorate....--

Can this creep never stop using people, even dead members of his own family, to his own ends?
Does he think no one who disagrees with him lost a loved one in the last year or never watched someone they love age and deteriorate?

[JM Hanes]

Yeah he watched, for a couple of weekends.

[bgates]

I know what its like to watch somebody you love, who's aging, deteriorate

And by "watch" I mean "once a month between sets of curls, listen to the report from the staffer I had call the home, unless CNN or MSNBC is running something good about how compelling my campaign is".

[Stephanie "the Ice Pick"]

So, she deteriorated and he watched? No comforting her, no reading to her, no feeding her ice chips, no interaction at all...

speaks volumes...

[MJW]

Here's the AP news headline that greeted me when I went to Yahoo:

Now, it's personal. President Barack Obama invoked his own anguish over the death of a loved one as he challenged the debunked notion that Democratic efforts to overhaul the nation's health care would include "death panels."

Nice to see they've mastered the art of condensing an entire editorial into a sinle headline.

[Through a glass, cloudly.]

bad, perhaps your grandmother was not considered safe for surgery or anesthesia, a supposition partially put to the lie by her long life afterwards. It illustrates the principle that the decisions must be made by the individuals involved, correctly informed, by themselves or others, and therein, of course, lies the rub.

Porch, I'd like to emphasize that I certainly don't mean that Obama isn't fit to be anyone's anything. I've got an appropriate role for him. He can be the player on the bench who impulsively leaps onto the field to tackle an opposing team's runner making an otherwise inevitable touchdown run. Now that's ignorant.

Variations on this theme could have him in the role of coach rather than player, or he could even tackle his own teammate. I like this last scenario best.

[cbinflux]

One merely needs to read 'Prairie Fire' to understand BHO and Michelle's game plan. Like Ragu, it's in there.
~~~~~~~~~~
Exclusive: Bill Ayers' 'Prairie Fire' in PDF Form
the PDF version of Barack Obama associates “Billy” Ayers’ and Bernardine Dohrn’s 1974 communist declaration of war against the United States.

Includes the dedication to Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, on page 5.
You may have read about this book, or seen it mentioned on Hannity and Colmes, but you cannot appreciate how radically insane and violent it is until you read it for yourself.

http://tinyurl.com/678gg8

[PD]

As Obama has said:

It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.

The "country" shouldn't make these decisions. Families should. I have, and I'll bet many of you have as well. I didn't need the government sticking its nose in where it doesn't belong.

That Obama cannot imagine people being capable of managing their affairs is very telling. I guess these end of life decisions, like when life begins, are above his pay grade. Makes you wonder what he *is* qualified to make a decision about.