Before we show Part 2 of Celebrity Death Panel, our friend from down under Susi Spice reminded me that we have readers at Beartoons that are NOT of the U.S. so a little explanation of what a Death Panel is might help the joke.
The phrase “Death Panel” was coined by former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin. President Barack Obama has been pushing Congress to pass some form of Healthcare reform bill. As part of one of the proposals, Medicare (the government subsidized healthcare program for older people) would offer voluntary counseling sessions to help seniors make end of life decisions like determining a healthcare advocate and whether or not they want extreme measures to keep them alive if they should code.
Based on other reports (some reasonable and some far fetched) about what the Healthcare Reform might do to current coverage, Sarah Palin wrote in her facebook page:
And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. 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.
While there certainly can be plenty of things to question in the proposed reforms, her specific interpretation has been fairly chastised as false in the press. Obama is taking heat from both sides with the far right saying his reforms go too far and the far left saying they don’t go far enough.
NOW BACK TO THE SHOW!!!!
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