ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Mama Grizzly warned us this would happen.
SPECIAL COVERAGE: Health Care Reform
Under Obamacare, the sick and weak and old would stand before death panels of bureaucrats to be granted life or death.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was laughed out of town for making four years ago what we now know is a prescient prediction. Perhaps she is one of the few who actually read the health care bill before it passed.
“And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course,” she wrote on her Facebook page in 2009.
“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.”
President Obama and his blind supporters who were busy not reading the bill howled in protest, calling Mrs. Palin an irresponsible liar unworthy of the public political stage.
The media’s alleged keeper of the truth PolitiFact declared her assertion the “Lie of the Year.”FactCheck.org, another alleged “truth” panel, summarily dismissed the claim as a “whopper.”
Now comes cancer survivor Edie Littlefield Sundby.
The ravages of Obamacare have not even set in yet and already she has been given what quite possibly will amount to a death sentence.
“For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis,” she writes in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
“I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.”
Now, for most people, knowing that a law you had engineered, rammed through Congress and crammed down the gagging throats of Americans everywhere had just destroyed the strategy meticulously laid out by doctors to keep a cancer patient alive long past her natural death date might cause a twinge of guilt.
Some of us might fall to our knees and beg for merciful forgiveness from God. Might even be convinced that as well-intended as we were, we turned out to be completely wrong. Indeed, a massive panel of bureaucrats cannot take over one-sixth of the nation’s economy and properly dispense medical care.
But admitting error or feeling guilt would require you to have an actual soul and be capable of shame or self-analysis. Such small weaknesses do not hinder the folks in this White House.
Dan Pfeiffer, who apparently has no soul, does have a Twitter account. He used it to dismiss Mrs. Sundby’s concerns about Obamacare and instead blamed the cancellation of her policy on her longtime insurance company — a company that has shelled out $1.2 million to keep Mrs. Sundby alive.
“United Healthcare dropped her coverage because they’ve struggled to compete in California’s individual health care market for years and didn’t want to pay for sicker patients like Sundby,” according to Mr. Pfeiffer’s tweet.
In other words: Sorry, Edie, but this is competition and if you fall behind, you die. It’s just how death panels work.
• Charles Hurt can be reached atcharleshurt@live.com or on Twitter at @charleshurt.
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