Death panel
[1] Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, coined the term when she charged that proposed legislation would create a "death panel" of bureaucrats who would carry out triage, i.e. decide whether Americans—such as her elderly parents, or son with Down syndrome—were "worthy of medical care".
[4] Palin's spokesperson pointed to Section 1233 of bill HR 3200 which would have paid physicians for providing voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about living wills, advance directives, and end-of-life care options.
[3] Owing to public concern, the provision to pay physicians for providing voluntary counseling was removed from the Senate bill and was not included in the law that was enacted, the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
[8] On July 16, 2009, former lieutenant governor of New York, Betsy McCaughey, a longtime opponent of federal healthcare legislation[9][10] said Section 1233 of HR 3200 was "a vicious assault on elderly people"[11] because it would "absolutely require" Medicare patients to have counseling sessions every five years that would "tell them how to end their life sooner".
[16] In the piece, which was titled "Deadly Doctors", McCaughey falsely asserted that presidential advisor Ezekiel Emanuel believed disabled people should not be entitled to medical care, and quoted him out of context.
[13] In early August, members of Congress held town hall meetings that were marked by hostility—including shouting, sporadic, physical altercations and comparisons between the proposed reforms and Nazi Germany.
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.
[36] A bill to provide for reimbursement every five years for office visit discussions with Medicare patients on advance directives, living wills, and other end of life care issues was proposed by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) in April 2009—with Republican cosponsors Charles Boustany (R-LA), a cardiovascular surgeon, Patrick Tiberi (R-OH), and Geoff Davis (R-KY).
[27] Former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham said it was "a lie crafted to foment opposition to the president's push for reform"[47] and Fox News analyst Juan Williams said "of course there is no such thing as any death panel.
[50] The Daily Telegraph noted that some critics of the U.S. reform used the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)—"as an example of [doing] the sort of drug rationing that amounted to a 'death panel'".
[54] Gawande said doctor's schedules of 20 minute appointments, a lack of payments and the emotional difficulty of conversations about mortality were barriers to the doctor-patient discussions about end-of-life care issues, which can take about an hour.
Currently, our system highly incentivizes delivery of cancer-directed interventions (chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and so on) over conversations that are critical to establishing a patient's goals and preferences and providing individualized care.
Corn also said that certain issues, such as whether experimental therapies should be reimbursed, the possible expansion of hospices, restoring dignity to the process of dying, and guidelines for physician assisted suicide, need to be addressed directly.
"[67] In a September 2009 speech, Palin said the term was "intended to sound a warning about the rationing that is sure to follow if big government tries to simultaneously increase health care coverage while also claiming to decrease costs.
[73] After Palin's statement, conservative commentators including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin agreed that death panels were mandated by the proposed legislation.
[83] Morone said the White House was not able to offer a "persuasive narrative to counter the Tea Party percussion", and "struggled to recapture public attention", contributing to Republican Scott Brown's election.
[87] Other findings from the survey included: Atul Gawande, a physician who writes on health care topics for The New Yorker, said "that the whole death panel reduction and reaction to it" temporarily "shut down our ability to even have a national discussion about how to have the right [end-of-life] conversation" between doctors and patients.
[89][90] Professor Harold Pollack wrote that given the "anxieties captured in the crystalline phrase 'death panel,' I would not commence a national cost-control discussion within the frightening and divisive arena of end-of-life care.
[98] A study by Regina G. Lawrence, a communications professor, and Matthew L. Schafer, a Juris Doctor candidate, found that "the mainstream news, particularly newspapers, debunked 'death panels' early, fairly often", however, some journalists presented information in a he said/she said style, often confusing readers, and most did not include an explanation as to why the charge was false.
[99] Lawrence and Schafer said that "the dilemma for reporters playing by the rules of procedural objectivity is that repeating a claim reinforces a sense of its validity—or at least, enshrines its place as an important topic of public debate.
However, in future such cases he recommended that "concerned scholars, citizens, and journalists ... [could] create negative publicity for the elites who are promoting misinformation", and "pressure the media to stop providing coverage to serial dissemblers.
Bush and John McCain who has overseen Medicare and Medicaid, said the charge was untrue and upsetting, adding that "[t]here are serious questions that are associated with policy aspects of the health care reform bills that we're seeing ... And there's frustration because so much of the discussion is around issues like the death panels and Ezekiel Emanuel that I think are red herrings at best.
"[109] Historian Jill Lepore characterized "death panels" as a conspiracy theory that is believed by a minority of the U.S. population and is based on fears that the federal government is conspiring to kill off its weakest members.
"[83] Political scientist James Morone said the term death panel played a role in the Democrats' loss of control over the public debate because they did not address the "underlying fears of big government".
[116][117] After the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released its recommendation to strengthen the IPAB, which had passed as part of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), she later charged that the board was " 'death panel'-like".
[126] Later that month, after the Affordable Care Act as amended by the Senate passed the House, conservative commentator David Frum made a widely-read post to his blog criticizing Republicans for their steadfast opposition to the bill over the previous year and a half.
There had been congressional Republicans willing to work with Democrats, he said, but they had refrained from doing so out of fear of political reprisals from the Tea Party and other elements of the conservative base that had been regularly encouraged by talk radio and Fox News to believe the worst of the bill.
"[128] In his 2011 book, former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee wrote that the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness from the 2009 stimulus were the seeds from which "the poisonous tree of death panels will grow.
[132][133] In 2018 Democratic socialist New York congressional candidate (later U. S. Representative) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Twitter, "Actually, we have for-profit 'death panels' now: they are companies + boards saying you're on your own bc they won't cover a critical procedure or medicine, Maybe if the GOP stopped hiding behind this 'socialist' rock they love to throw, they'd actually engage on-issue for once.
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