Palin is Dead Right on Death Panels

RUSH: These are death panels, by the way. In Levin’s book, Liberty and Tyranny, let me quote: ‘Barbara Wagner was diagnosed with a recurrence of lung cancer. Her doctors recommended a specific drug to help prolong and improve the quality of her life.

‘However, Barbara is a resident of Oregon and therefore, part of the state-run Oregon Health Plan. The state refused Barbara Wagner’s request for the drug since it doesn’t cover drugs that are meant to prolong the life of individuals with advanced cancer. After all, when the Oregon Health Plan was established in 1994 it ‘was expressly intended to ration health care” to save money. ‘But Oregon also has legalized assisted suicide, and in an unsigned letter from the state, Barbara was informed that the health plan would pay to cover the costs of a doctor to help her kill herself,’ but not give her the drug to prolong her life. She was not ready to have herself killed. ‘However, it seemed she had reached a dead end until a pharmaceutical company that invented the drug learned about her case and stepped in to provide Barbara with the drug free of charge.’

We already have Obamacare in several states. These death panels that — and, ‘Sarah Palin Doubles Down on ‘Death Panels,” according to The Politico. She’s now defended her claim that the Democratic health care proposal would create ‘death panels’ in a statement Wednesday night slamming’ Obama. If you go to her Facebook page and you look at the notes and you look at the things she wrote about death panels, it would seem to me that all of the inside-the-Beltway elites — from Peggy Noonan to Mort Kondracke to Charles Krauthammer to whoever the hell else — said (mocking voice), ‘She needs to educate herself on the issues! She needs to become more sophisticated. She needs to do some homework!’

It seems to me if you go to her Facebook, she’s done some homework on this health care bill. She’s become an expert on Section 1233. Politico writes about she’s ‘doubling down.’ She’s not backing down. She is doubling down, and this has got the White House in a defensive tizzy. But I would suggest that anybody who doubts her intellectual heft or her ability to learn and study, go to her Facebook page and look at the notes that she’s taken. It’s right there, the study that she has done and engaged in, in order to learn about section 1233. Now, this story in Oregon involving Barbara Wagner, again it’s in Mark Levin’s book Liberty and Tyranny, illustrates that they are death panels. And it’s a great way to phrase this end-of-life counseling and so forth. There’s no question that these expenses, these end-of-life expenses are among the most costly, and they will be used to cut costs. But the thing that nobody’s talking about is you don’t have to be old for them to kick in.

All you have to do is have a disease that the government says, ‘Eh, it’s just not worth paying for this.’ You could have advanced cancer, you could be 35 years old and they could say, ‘Sorry,’ and that’s where this is headed. When you boil all of this down, when you really synthesize everything Obama wants to do down, it comes down to this: He wants to put your medical records on Google; wants to have everybody be able to see them. He wants to take over control from Congress of deciding what Medicare and Medicaid will spend, on who, and on what. He wants the White House, he wants the executive branch, to be making determinations of who lives and who dies — which will lead to the regulation of every lifestyle or life in this country. When you boil down all the legalese and all of these 1,017 pages, you boil it down, Obama wants to run it. And the reason that he’s not being specific about his plan is purely politically strategic, right out of the brain of David Axelrod — and I’ll explain that to you and get to these funny audio sound bites when we come back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: All right, Lisa Murkowski, Alaska senator, at a town hall meeting in Anchorage said this about the health care debate.

MURKOWSKI: It does us no good to incite fear in people by saying that these end-of-life provisions, these death panels. I’m so… Quite honestly, I’m so offended at that terminology because it absolutely isn’t. There is no reason to gin up fear in the American public by saying things that are not included in the bill.

RUSH: Now, here again, this is why you members of Congress are in deep trouble. End-of-life provisions are in the bill, and it’s simply a matter of logic. We don’t treat the healthy! The healthy have very little money spent on them for their health care ’cause they’re not sick. Only the sick are expensive and if we gotta ‘save money in health care,’ where you going to cut? You can’t cut money you’re not spending on the healthy. There are end-of-life provisions! There can be no other way. And it’s not just end-of-life. It’s going to be even young people have certain diseases that are determined to be not worth treating because of cost or the stage of the disease, the government’s going to be in the position to decide who gets treatment and who doesn’t. And, Senator Murkowski, it is irresponsible of you not be informed enough to understand this. Your constituents understand it. They have read it.