A Death Panel Toldja So

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKRpGs4hEZs

My pal Steve Malzberg, now hosting a show on Newsmax TV, scored big this week with an interview with leftist journalist Mark Halperin — co-author of Game Change, and the former ABC News political director who once sent a memo directing reporters to be biased in their coverage of the Bush-Kerry election. Halperin admitted that Obamacare includes death panels — committees of bureaucrats who will decide when your life is no longer of value to the state. Here’s a transcript via Media Research Center:

MALZBERG, HOST: A lot of people said you weren’t going to be able to keep your health care, but also they focused on the death panels, which will be coming, call them what you will, rationing, is part of it…

HALPERIN: No, I agree, and that’s going to be a huge issue, and that’s something else on which the president was not fully forthcoming and straightforward.

MALZBERG: So, you believe there will be rationing, a.k.a. death panels?

HALPERIN: It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled.

Later, Halperin backtracked, but he was clearly just being mealy-mouthed. He was right the first time. The panels are in the act.

Now, I wrote about the inevitability of this in 2009 in the Wall Street Journal. In an op-ed entitled “The Panel,” I imagined a future victim of the ObamaCare State:

It begins to occur to you that this is how you are going to die: by the fiat of fatuous ideologues—that is to say, by the considered judgment of a government committee. They are going to snuff you out and never lose a minute’s sleep over it, because it’s only fair, after all.

That logic is implacable too. Free people can treat each other justly, but they can’t make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.

I only remind the reader of this because of the reaction I got at the time. You can get the gist of it by reading some of the comments on the WSJ site in which I’m accused of writing “fiction,” “science fiction,” and of being a paranoid schizophrenic, among other things.

So I would now like all those who made such comments — online and in my email — to imagine my response. And, ala Obama, let me suggest you spend Thanksgiving dinner breaking it to Grandma that the Hopey-Changey One thinks it’s time she stop being such a burden…