Here’s President Obama, in his big Sept. 9 speech on health care:
Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.
OK, Mr. President, we believe you. But here’s your biggest fan, Newsweek editor-at-large Evan Thomas, the guy who called you “the great teacher” and “sort of God”:
The idea that we might ration health care to seniors (or anyone else) is political anathema. Politicians do not dare breathe the R word, lest they be accused—however wrongly—of trying to pull the plug on Grandma. But the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate. Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it. At a more basic level, Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable.
Got that, Mr. President? Our health care system “will remain unfixable” unless we “spend less money on the elderly at the end of life.”
The title of Evans’s article, in the Sept. 21 issue of Newsweek, is “The Case for Killing Granny.”
Go granny, go granny, go granny go–to the death panel.