Sarah Palin: Obamacare will create a series of death panels

From the Capitol Column:  Sarah Palin: Obamacare will create a series of death panels

Former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin revived her argument that President Obama’s key legislative accomplishment — health care — will create a series of death panels.
In a Facebook post published Tuesday, Ms. Palin said that a upcoming ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court is the latest indication that a vast majority of the public.

“It was a pretty long post, but a lot of people seem to have only read two words of it: ‘death panel,’” Ms. Palin wrote Tuesday. “Though I was called a liar for calling it like it is, many of these accusers finally saw that Obamacare did in fact create a panel of faceless bureaucrats who have the power to make life and death decisions about health care funding.”

Ms. Palin’s latest post comes over a year since her first post sprouted outrage from Democrats, who charged Ms. Palin with demagoguery.

In her original post, Ms. Palin said President Obama’s health care measure would create an unnecessary level of bureaucracy that could cost millions of Americans hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

“We must step up and engage in this most crucial debate. Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back…. Let’s stop and think and make our voices heard before it’s too late,” Ms. Palin wrote at the time. “The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.”

Writing at the time Ms. Palin faced criticism for referencing her children, one of which has been diagnosed with Down Syndrome. Writing as the health care law was being debated in Congress, Ms. Palin said that the health care law could close off her children from medical access.

“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 healthcare,” she wrote as the law was being debated. “Such a system in downright evil.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to release its ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Obama’s health care law on Thursday. It remains unclear how the nine justices will rule on the matter, which could present Mr. Obama with a number of hurdles in his bid for re-election. The stakes cannot be overstated — what the justices decide will have an immediate and long-term impact on all Americans, both in how they get medicine and health care, say analysts.