Death Panels

Does anybody reading actually believe that this new government-run healthcare bill in Congress actually plans on setting up "death panels" to kill grandma?

The "death panels" that Republicans have been talking about lately are actually a stipulation for end-of-life consultations (inserted to the bill, I might add, by a Republican Congressman) in which an elderly patient sits down with his family, his doctor, and perhaps his lawyer, and they all discuss what measures should be taken to prolong life in generally hopeless medical situations.

You see, medicine has gotten to the point where a body can be kept alive long past the point where a person's mind has either (a) left the building or (b) can tolerate the suffering or the intrusion caused by efforts to sustain life. Without a proper "living will" in one's medical record, your grieving spouse may refuse to give you up and force the last remnants of your waning and noncommunicative spirit to suffer hugely for a few more days (or weeks, or months) on this earth before your body goes beyond what medicine can sustain.

The default position of doctors, barring all other input from a patient's medical decision makers is to prolong life for as long as it can be sustained. A close second is to minimize suffering. When those two efforts start to work against each other — when prolongation of life causes suffering — doctors will turn to the end-of-life decisions like DNR/DNI (do not resuscitate / do not intubate) forms on file to make decisions.

Republicans and their "death panels" want to now remove this decision-making process from the list of things that would be covered by government-run health insurance. Well... let's be honest: They want to do away with the entire healthcare bill, and are just using this as a red herring to scare people. They know as well as everybody else about end-of-life directives, but they come up with these falsehoods purposefully to derail the opposition and turn ignorant public opinion against them.

Sad but typical.