Governor Palin's Year of Health Care Rationing Prescience

This past December, Politifact called Governor Palin's "death panel" Facebook post "the political lie of the year". While those of us who understood Governor Palin's statement in context knew full well that she was stating the truth about rationing of care that would occur under a more socialized system of healthcare, based upon the kinds of people President Obama has placed in his administration, it should be quite clear that rationing is a means to the ends of his version "health care reform".

Last night, following the recess appointment of Dr. Don Berwick to head up Medicare and Medicad. Governor Palin tweeted:

Press Corps-pls do your job as Obama sneaks in Berwick appt;pls cover his mission:socialized healthcare&rationing based on"quality of life"

As citizen journalists, let's take a look at Berwick, shall we? In May, I wrote a post for our local 912 Project that partly focused on Berwick:

On April 19th, President Obama nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to be the administrator for the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Berwick has expressed support for the the National Health Service, the United Kingdom's government-run healthcare system that has the UK lagging on breast care survival, heart attack mortality, and life expectancy compared to even other European countries with socialized medicine. You can hear his support for the the NHS in the video below of a 2008 speech in the United Kingdom:

Berwick has additionally expressed support for the UK's National Institute for Clinical Health Excellence (NICE), the entity that determines the "clinical effectiveness" of various procedures and treatments and whether or not a patient should receive such treatment and other standards regarding care. In essence, NICE determines the quantity of care that a patient receives based upon the incurred cost. In the clip above, Berwick favors for UK healthcare system over that of the United States' system as it is now.

Hmm, rationing of care? Support for an entity like NICE? Death panels, anyone? Of course this is not the first Obama administration official to espouse this mindset. Last summer, Governor Palin and Congresswoman Bachmann called out President Obama' s health care adviser, Zeke Emanuel:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, 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.

Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.

Rep. Michele Bachmann highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff, in a floor speech to the House of Representatives. I commend her for being a voice for the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.

Both the man who advises the President on health care and the man charged with the duty of overseeing entitlement health care programs that provide for millions of Americans are strong supporters of rationing. It's quite obvious that perhaps in addition to spreading around the wealth, President Obama wants to spread around the health. In addition to these men, former White House economic adviser, Peter Orszag, has said, " the only real solution…is to move toward a healthcare system that is based upon quality and efficiency — not upon quantity.” If a healthcare system is not based upon quantity, then it means that the number of patients who can be treated is limited, rationing. While quality and efficiency are noble goals--you want to make sure that people are well treated and not overtreated--these cannot be goals that take precedence over ensuring that people are actually treated at all.

So nearly a year after the Facebook post heard 'round the world, it's become even more apparent that Governor Palin was extremely prescient about the means to justify President Obama's health care reform ends: rationing. The biggest political lie now? Those claims that Governor Palin lied about death panel!

Cross posted here and here.