Liberals screamed when Sarah Palin warned about “death panels” during the run up to the passage of Obamacare. But many really want health care rationing based on invidious methods of medical discrimination–as I have repeatedly reported here. I was just watching This Week and Steve Rattner–former adviser to Obama Treasury Dept. who has written in favor of death panels–alluded to them again. In a discussion on medical spending and cost control, he said (my transcription:)
Rattner: Here is a small question for the country…Right now most Americans do not see price in deciding whether to use healthcare…When people go on Medicare, they really don’t see price, they tend to consume more than they otherwise would. Twenty-six percent of all Medicare spending is last year of life. We don’t know how much of that is really efficacious spending. These are really tough moral questions for the country but we are going to have to deal with them.
Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal caught the reference:
Strassel: What you are getting to though is the fundamental question: Are you going to let consumers make those choices about end of life decisions, or are you going to have Medicare make a decision about what procedures you can have and how much they will pay, and government make those choices. That’s the moral question...
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
