#marklevin gets a call from Eric in Ft Lauderdale about #ObamaCare

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Comment by Clint Counts on March 14, 2013 at 11:55am

Steven Rattner: 'We Need Death Panels';

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.      What follows are several paragraphs from Rattner's Times September 16 op-Ed. Rattner understates the real-world power of ObamaCare's Independent Advisory Board, which makes his citation of England's version of death panels as something worthy of imitation a de facto admission (to the point where it doesn't matter whether he himself admits it) that Palin is right about ObamaCare as it was proposed (at the time of her Facebook post) and ultimately enacted (bolds are mine):

WE need death panels.

he famous “third rails” of American politics — none stands taller than overtly acknowledging that elderly Americans are not entitled to every conceivable medical procedure or pharmaceutical.

Most notably, President Obama’s estimable Affordable Care Act regrettably includes severe restrictions on any reduction in Medicare services or increase in fees to beneficiaries..

..Many countries whose health care systems are regularly extolled — including Canada, Australia and New Zealand — have systems for rationing care.

Take Britain, which provides universal coverage with spending at proportionately almost half of American levels. Its National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence uses a complex quality-adjusted life year system to put an explicit value (up to about $48,000 per year) on a treatment’s ability to extend life.

Enter the Independent Payment Advisory Board. ObamaCare deliberately insulated it from normal Congressional oversight and approval (its word is law  By dictating overall spending levels, IPAB will restrict care without knowing who they're doing it to, leaving the dirty work of deciding exactly who should and shouldn't receive care to hospitals and other medical providers. Consider it death panel outsourcing. You can rest assured that providers will get the latest and greatest advice from the likes of "Zeke the Bleak" Emanuel and others with a utilitarian view of humanity on implementing "quality-adjusted life year system" and schemes to decide who is unworthy of medical attention up to and including continued life.

Rattner has only admitted what anyone who has studied the situation already knows: ObamaCare will lead to rationing, which will lead to life-death decisions being made outside of patients' and their families' control. PolitiFact's Halon was and is wrong. Palin was and remains right. Halon and PolitiFact should own up to their error. It's an extremely safe bet that they won't. Leftists rarely do