By PETER SUDERMAN

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Facing growing resistance to Medicaid costs, the Obama administration’s Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, sent a letter to states last week noting the “urgency of your State budget concerns” and suggesting some minor program changes to save money. They aren’t enough.

At roughly 21% of total state spending, Medicaid is already the single largest item in state budgets, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Between 2008 and 2009 (the latest year for which figures are available), annual spending growth on the program nearly doubled, growing to 9% from 4.9%.

Medicaid currently covers 53 million people at an overall cost of $373.9 billion (states are responsible for about half). But starting in 2014, ObamaCare rules will add about 20 million more, according to Richard Foster, the program’s chief actuary.

Yet state budgets are already being squeezed. Washington state, facing a $5.7 billion budget hole, has ordered the Medicaid program to cut its budget by 6.3%. The state cannot reduce eligibility to enroll without jeopardizing federal funding altogether. Its only option is to eliminate “optional benefits” (not federally required) such as dental services and speech therapy—one of the options suggested in Ms. Sebelius’s letter. That sounds good, but it’s not enough. “Even if we eliminate every single optional benefit, we still don’t get there,” Doug Porter, the state’s Medicaid director, told Governing magazine.

“At a time when there is virtually unanimous agreement that health care reform is needed in this country, it is hard to invalidate and strike down a statute titled ‘The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,’ ” Judge Roger Vinson observed Monday in his ruling in Florida v. HHS,which did just that.

It would have been a lot harder had ObamaCare enjoyed wide political support. But it did not and does not. Americans never bought the bill of goods that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and their supporters in the formerly mainstream media tried to sell. A good deal of the credit goes to Sarah Palin, for coining the phrase “death panel” in an August 2009 Facebook post.

Four months later PolitiFact.com, a project of the left-leaning St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, named the phrase “lie of the year”:

Her assertion–that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care–spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, “Death panels? Really?”In truth, PolitiFact was more vulnerable to the charge of lying than Palin was, for its highly literal, out-of-context interpretation of her words was at best extremely tendentious. What she wrote was this:

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. 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.Palin put the term “death panel” in quotes to indicate that she was using it figuratively. She was not lying but doing just the opposite: conveying a fundamental truth about ObamaCare. Proponents were describing it as a sort of fiscal perpetual-motion machine: We’re going to give free insurance to tens of millions of people and reduce the deficit! As a matter of simple arithmetic, the only way to do that is by drastically curtailing medical benefits.

“Health care by definition involves life and death decisions,” Palin wrote. ObamaCare necessarily expands the power of federal bureaucrats to make such decisions, and it creates enormous fiscal pressures to err on the side of death. Whether it establishes literal panels for that purpose is a hair-splitting quibble. By naming this “lie of the year,” PolitiFact showed itself to be less seeker of truth than servant of power.

President Obama, meanwhile, treated Palin’s criticism as a joke. As we noted at the time, he told a New Hampshire town meeting: “The rumor that’s been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for ‘death panels’ that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we’ve decided that we don’t–it’s too expensive to let her live anymore.” The transcript records that the audience laughed at this callous “joke.”

The perpetual-motion claim wasn’t the only deception at the heart of the argument for ObamaCare. Consider the individual mandate, whose unconstitutionality was the center of Judge Vinson’s ruling. In a footnote, Vinson quotes a critic of the idea as observing, “If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.” Guess who? CNSNews.com digs up the full context:

“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it,” [then-Sen. Barack] Obama said in a Feb. 28, 2008 appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’ television show. “So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

Obama ran for office on opposition to the individual mandate, then made it the centerpiece of his signature legislative initiative. Perhaps this should have been “lie of the year.” At PolitiFact.com, it wasn’t even a runner-up.

And what is the individual mandate, anyway? In September 2009, ABC News host George Stephanopoulos argued in an interview with the president that it is a tax increase. Obama strenuously denied it and indeed accused Stephanopoulos of dishonesty: “For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. . . . George, you–you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase.”

By last July, the administration was–well, just making up that language and deciding that that’s called a tax increase. As even the New York Times reported:

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Lie of the year? Nope, again not even a PolitiFact.com runner-up. The winner for 2010, announced Dec. 16, was “The Democrats’ health care reform law is a ‘government takeover of health care.’ ” This was a “lie,” PolitiFact averred, because the government did not formally nationalize the health-insurance industry via the so-called public option.

The same day that PolitiFact was announcing its 2010 “lie of the year,” an exchange in Judge Vinson’s courtroom was giving the lie to it. As Bloomberg reported:

“We’ve always exercised the freedom whether we want to buy or not buy a product,” Vinson told the Obama administration’s lawyer.

[Justice Department lawyer Ian] Gershengorn said health insurance is “a financing mechanism,” not a product. “It’s not shoes,” he said. “It’s not cars. It’s not broccoli.”

As we wrote at the time:

Under the scheme envisioned by ObamaCare, in which insurers would be obliged to cover all comers, a medical policy would no longer be insurance–that is, a contract to indemnify the policyholder against risk. It would instead be, as Gershengorn describes it, a “financing mechanism” for medical services. . . . Because participation would be mandatory, the “premium,” and not just the penalty for failure to pay it, would effectively be a tax.

In a famous 2003 video, Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, declared, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program.” That is, Obama wished for a system of outright socialization of health-care costs, in which the government would pay for medical treatment using tax dollars. ObamaCare differs from such a system only in that ostensibly private insurance companies act as the government’s middleman, collecting the taxes and paying the benefits.

“Government takeover,” like “death panel,” is a true description of ObamaCare’s essence. These phrases are “inaccurate” only in that they cut through formal distinctions designed to deceive the public. (We wish we could use a barnyard vulgarity in place of the unwieldy clause “formal distinctions designed to deceive the public,” but The Wall Street Journal is a family newspaper.)

“Death panel” was especially effective at cutting through the hockey. Lots of people warned about rationing, but, as PolitiFact grudgingly acknowledged, it was Palin’s vivid language that “launched the health care debate into overdrive. The term was mentioned in news reports approximately 6,000 times in August and September, according to the Nexis database. By October, it was still being mentioned 150 to 300 times a week.”

Many of these media mentions were disparaging, “raising issues,” as PolitiFact prissily puts it, about “the bounds of acceptable political discussion.” In other words, Palin’s statement was widely propagated by journalists who thought it “unacceptable.” Americans recognized the essential truth of Palin’s words and strongly opposed ObamaCare.

Palin got the truth out with the help of journalists determined to bolster the deceptions at the heart of ObamaCare. She was instrumental in winning the political argument that looks increasingly likely to render ObamaCare’s legislative victory a Pyrrhic one. Sarah Palin outsmarted the formerly mainstream media simply by being blunt and honest. That is why they burn with a mindless rage against her.

By Michelle Malkin

It’s time for America’s youth to buckle up and take a rough ride on Reality Highway. For the past two years, President Obama has promised our children the moon, stars, rainbows, unicorns and universal health care for all. But the White House Santa’s cradle-to-grave entitlement mandates are a spectacularly predictable bust.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Obamacare’s own biggest cheerleaders.

Late last month, the Service Employees International Union informed dues-paying members of its behemoth 1199 affiliate in New York that it was dropping its health care coverage for children. That’s right. A radical leftist union, not an evil Republican corporation, is abandoning the young ‘uns to cut costs.

More than 30,000 low-wage families will be affected, according to The Wall Street Journal. Who’s to blame? SEIU 1199 benefits manager Mitra Behroozi singled out oppressive new state and federal regulations, including the much-ballyhooed Obamacare rule forcing insurers to cover dependents well into their 20s:

“…(N)ew federal health-care reform legislation requires plans with dependent coverage to expand that coverage up to age 26,” Behroozi explained in an Oct. 22 letter to members. “Our limited resources are already stretched as far as possible, and meeting this new requirement would be financially impossible.”[Union Drops Health Coverage for Workers’ Children, By Yuliya Chernova, November 20, 2010]

In a related development, over the past several months several insurers across California, Colorado, Ohio and Missouri have dropped child-only plans because of Obamacare-induced premium increases. Untold tens of thousands of families who purchase their plans in the private individual health market will be affected.

Let us pause for a moment to ruminate on this wholly man-caused disaster. To sell Obamacare and manufacture support, desperate Democrats pandered to the college set and their parents. Former SEIU chief Andy Stern specifically touted the unfunded kiddie insurance mandate as a strategic selling point, telling the Washington Post early this year that the lobbying and public relations campaign would be “helped by which parts of the bill go into effect immediately. It’s hard to talk about things that’ll happen in 2019. But if you can say to people that if your kid is 26 years old, you can keep him on your insurance plan? … They get that.”

Some 20 states had already passed legislation requiring insurers to cover adult children before the federal rule was imposed. Citing results in New Jersey, Wisconsin and elsewhere, many critics pointed to how such top-down benefits mandates were driving up the cost of insurance and limiting access instead of expanding it. In response, top SEIU thug Dennis Rivera accused Obamacare opponents of “terrorist tactics” in a conference call earlier this spring with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Now, confronted with the thorny allocation of scarce resources, profligate money managers at the SEIU are dropping thousands of kids’ health coverage because they, too, can’t afford to foot the bill imposed by the president whom their union bosses spent more than $60 million to elect. And SEIU’s Rivera is nowhere to be found.

The SEIU also pumped tens of millions of dollars in union funds directly into the campaign for Obamacare. Workers regurgitated White House talking points hyping increased access, lower premiums and peace of mind for the working class. SEIU 1199—which is now cutting off health care coverage to children whose parents work in the health care industry of all industries—was at the forefront of those D.C.-directed “reform” rallies. The same militant leaders of SEIU 1199 sent hordes of their workers on buses to an anti-tea party rally convened by Comedy Central clowns in October, while their benefits and pension funds eroded.

Yes, the union road to hell is paved with workers’ own hard-earned dues money. All hail progressivism!

How far we’ve come from the halcyon moment when President Obama rallied young college students at George Mason University in Virginia in March. To wild applause, he pledged:

“If you buy a new plan, there won’t be lifetime or restrictive annual limits on the amount of care you receive from your insurance companies. (Applause.) And by the way, to all the young people here today, starting this year if you don’t have insurance, all new plans will allow you to stay on your parents’ plan until you are 26 years old. (Applause.)”

Cue bitter laughter here. As I reported two weeks ago, more than 111 unions (including two SEIU affiliates), companies and insurers have now secured federal waivers to escape the first provision Obama mentioned to the George Mason University students. And more financially strapped union affiliates like SEIU 1199 will undoubtedly be canceling children’s coverage to escape the costs tied to Obama’s second vow.

For the kiddie human shields who helped the Democrats dig their own ditch, reality bites. Live and learn.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Michelle Malkin [email her] is the author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s review. Click here for Michelle Malkin’s website. Michelle Malkin is also author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild and the just-released Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies.

Via: Medcitizen

By: Dr. Westby Fisher

“By releasing stolen and classified documents, Wikileaks has put at risk not only the cause of human rights, but also the lives and work of the individuals. We condemn in strongest terms, the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information. “Official White House statement yesterday regarding Wikileaks disclosure of diplomatic cables”

No matter what people think of Wikileaks disclosure of approximately 250,000 classified diplomatic cables to the Internet yesterday with the help of the New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, the implications to electronic healthcare information security are significant.

Day in and day out, I type huge volumes of information on my patients on a computer and my fellow physicians do the same. As a result, vast health care information warehouses are at the disposal of the government, insurers, and major health care institutions eager to become more efficient, strategic or competitive. We are promised the information is private, confidential, and even stripped of its identifiers for group analysis. It is even protected to remain so by law.

And now we find that even the government’s most sensitive and classified diplomatic data is subject to disclosure, some how, some way.

Worse, once the leak occurs, the government is powerless to correct the breech.

While a single individual’s private healthcare information may not carry the gravitas of wartime communiques, each of us deals with famous patients who might not want their diagnosis, HIV status, or drinking history spread far and wide. For them, this private information might be just as personally damaging as anything disclosed by WikiLeaks.

Yet in our new Era of the Electronic Medical Record and government funding of health care in America, we now find that this potential loss of our health care privacy is the price (and risk) for care we’ll have to accept.

Westby G. Fisher, MD, FACC is a board certified internist, cardiologist, and cardiac electrophysiologist (doctor specializing in heart rhythm disorders) practicing at NorthShore University HealthSystem, Evanston, IL and is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine.

Via: Heritage Center Web Site Health Care Memo

Repealing Obamacare and Getting Health Care Right

by Nina Owcharenko

Americans want health care reform—but not the reforms put in place under the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (PPACA). The new law moves America’s health care system in the wrong direction, transferring vast powers to Washington bureaucrats who will control the dollars and decisions that should be in the hands of individual patients and their families. It is no surprise that most Americans continue to oppose the new law and that clear majorities want it repealed. A recent Rasmussen poll, for example, found that 53 percent of likely voters favor repeal.

Repeal

Congress must repeal the new law. Congress cannot build sound market-based health care reform on the PPACA foundation, which is utterly incompatible with a health care system based on consumer choice and free markets.

Beyond the unprecedented mandates, new taxes, massive entitlement expansion, unworkable and costly insurance provisions, and its failure to control costs, the new law concentrates enormous power in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It creates a giant network for the federal micromanagement of health plans, benefits, insurance markets, and unprecedented intervention into the details of health care financing and the delivery of medical care.

The early result is a veritable flood of controversial rules and regulations, administrative decisions, and guidelines directly affecting the lives of millions of Americans. This regulatory regime, administered by unelected bureaucrats, is even more onerous because of the fundamental flaws of the hastily enacted legislation itself, including undefined provisions and unrealistic timeliness. Those with the knowledge, access, and influence with the Administration are more likely to obtain exemptions than those who are not so fortunate. The new law allows the HHS Secretary to apply the provisions of the law and to enforce it as she sees fit, thus granting the Secretary the right to determine winners and losers.

Keeping Up the Pressure

While working to achieve full repeal, Members should continue to focus on the failures and consequences of the new law, block its implementation at every opportunity, and exert strong oversight over the implementation process.

Block. The most straightforward approach to blocking the new law is for Members of Congress to stop funding for key provisions. For example, they could prohibit funding from going toward the Internal Revenue Service for enforcing the individual mandate.

In addition, Members should also look at triggers or other mechanisms to stop or delay key provisions from going into effect. This should include reliance on the Congressional Review Act, a law enabling Congress to block or halt onerous rules and regulations before they do damage to businesses or other sectors of the health care economy.

Oversight. A new Congress should also pursue fair, open, and thorough hearings on the implementation of the new law. With its rush toward passage of the new law in March, Congress left numerous questions unanswered, and these issues have broad implications for employers, employees, states, doctors and hospitals, and other key players in the health care sector of the economy.

For example, the Administration’s use of waivers and exemptions from its own rules deserve scrutiny; so does the impact of the law on state budgets, the workforce, and the overall economy. In addition, Congress should conduct a robust review of the regulatory process itself, the main engine through which much of the law is being enforced and finalized.

Getting Health Care Reform Back on Track

There are many policy options Congress should consider, after repeal of PPACA, to begin moving the system in the right direction and put the country on the right path toward market-based health care change that gives people better choices and allows them to take account of the price and value of health care. For example, Congress should:

• Provide individual tax relief for all persons purchasing private health insurance, regardless of where they work;
• Eliminate barriers to individuals purchasing health care coverage that best suits their personal needs across state lines;
• Allow employers to convert their health care compensation from a defined benefit package to a defined contribution system;
• Promote new group purchasing arrangements based on individual membership organizations and various associations, including union, fraternal, ethnic, and religiously based groups;
• Improve consumer-directed health options (such as health savings accounts, health reimbursement arrangements, and flexible spending accounts) that encourage greater transparency and consumer control over health care decisions;
• Extend rational pre-existing condition protections in the non-group health insurance markets for those with continuous creditable coverage, thus rewarding responsible persons who buy and maintain coverage;
• Set up a fair competitive bidding process to determine government payment in traditional Medicare fee-for-service and Medicare Advantage programs;
• Review Medicare rules and regulations and eliminate those that unduly burden doctors and patients, such as the restriction preventing doctors and patients to contract privately for medical services outside of the traditional Medicare program;
• Encourage the states to set up mechanisms such as high-risk pools and risk transfer models that help lessen the problems of individuals who are difficult to insure;
• Expand states’ ability to develop consumer-based reforms that enable states to customize solutions for their citizens;
• Strengthen premium assistance in Medicaid to enable young families to obtain private health insurance coverage;
• Improve patient-centered health care models for those on Medicaid;
• Increase federal and state efforts to combat fraud and abuse in Medicaid, including tightening eligibility loopholes in Medicaid for long-term-care services;
• Encourage personal savings and the development of a robust private insurance market for long-term-care needs;
• Make the ban on taxpayer-funded abortion permanent and government-wide and extend a similar permanent policy to ensure protection of the right of conscience among medical providers and personnel; and
• Stop new tax increases and promote tax cuts that would expand private insurance coverage and grow the economy.

The Right Way Forward for America

After repeal of PPACA, Congress should pursue targeted policy solutions that address practical problems faced by millions of Americans in a step-by-step and fully transparent legislative process. This would move the health care system in the right direction.

In the end, fundamental policy issues must be tackled to achieve lasting health care reform. These include promoting personal control through tax equity, ensuring portability of health insurance, fixing financially troubled and underperforming government health care programs, and engaging in a federal–state partnership to address the particular challenges faced by very different states. These elements are at the core of transforming today’s health care economy into one where individuals and families can control their own dollars and make their own decisions.

Nina Owcharenko is Director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Video obtained from PalinTV

Via: Wall Street Journal

One of the tragi-comic sideshows of passing ObamaCare was the Democratic attempt to buy off the American Medical Association by promising a permanent fix to the Medicare payment formula for doctors. Apparently permanent is four weeks.

That’s the upshot of last Thursday night’s Senate vote to postpone an automatic 23% cut in Medicare physician payments, but only through New Year’s Day. The House plans to approve the same deal next week, and you should think of this as Nancy Pelosi’s housewarming gift for Speaker-presumptive John Boehner.

Democrats got their AMA endorsement of ObamaCare from immediate past president James Rohack, who was last seen leaving the Beltway on a turnip truck. But Democrats left a permanent fix out of the final ObamaCare bill in order to keep the official price tag below $1 trillion. Democrats planned to pass the $250 billion “doc fix” later in a separate bill, but somehow they never got around to it. Even liberals can’t always conjure up a quarter-trillion dollars on demand, and some Democrats wanted the fix “paid for” with other spending cuts, real or invented.

The result has been a string of temporary last-minute reprieves. This will be the fourth this year, which is even worse than the annual “doc fix” fire drill that prevailed under both Democrats and Republicans until ObamaCare sopped up all the easy budget money. The Senate’s latest one-month version costs $1 billion and is paid for by claiming to reduce certain outpatient therapy payments by about $100 million each year for the next decade. Anyone willing to bet on whether those cuts will ever happen? We’ll take the “no” side of that wager.

In sum, Democrats deceived the AMA about the doc fix and are now deceiving voters about how they’ll pay for even this four-week reprieve. And they’re dumping the $250 billion bill on Republicans.

This doctor-payment charade has served both parties since it was created in 1997 as a palm-greaser for campaign contributions and to disguise the real costs of Medicare as part of the Bill Clinton-Newt Gingrich balanced budget deal. But these Democratic abuses are something else. Three of the four stopgaps this year have passed after the deadline set by the previous stopgap, so for a time Medicare simply stopped paying doctors, causing back-office disruptions nationwide. Imagine if a private insurer pulled these stunts.

A more stable payment system that reflects the real costs of delivering medical care while reining in federal health spending would mean dumping the Medicare price-control model that has led to the current mess. A good place to start are Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform ideas, which were endorsed last week by no less than the long-time Democratic budget hand Alice Rivlin. Maybe now that the AMA has been exposed as fools one more time, its new leaders will support genuine reform.

Some of her staff now appear to be putting the pieces in place in case Palin does decide to run. One of the aides, who only eats kosher food, told a local rabbi he was looking into longer term arrangements in Iowa.

“He was looking to be able to accommodate the needs of those coming down looking to set up shop here for campaigning in the coming years,” said Yossi Jacobson of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Des Moines

This paragraph is factually incorrect. How would I know? Because I happen to be the so called “Palin aide”. Actually I’m not a Palin aide. Just like millions of Americans I am a grassroots supporter of Governor Palin. Here’s what really happened:

I was truly excited about the possibility of meeting Governor Sarah Palin at her book signing event in Des Moines, Iowa on Saturday. Having seen her speak at other venues, I never cease to be impressed by her boundless energy, deep compassion and unswerving love for this country and its core values. She is a great American and I am proud to be among her grassroots supporters.

On Thursday evening I had the pleasure of speaking with the Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi emissary (Rabbi Jacobson) in Des Moines, Iowa, in order to inquire about the availability of Kosher food and a shul (synagogue) in the town during my brief stint to Iowa on Saturday for the book signing. I explained that I am a grass root supporter of Governor Palin and editor of a blog site “Physicians4Palin,” and I wanted to know about Jewish resources in the area so that when I return (hopefully) to campaign for her as a grassroots supporter with my friends and colleagues in the future we could enjoy the spirituality of the Sabbath and our faith.

In talking with the Rabbi, it became obvious that there were many others in his community who were extremely supportive the Governor. I raised the possibility of organizing a future Shabbaton for grassroot supporters in conjunction with other group’s. He seemed very excited with this concept. We spoke about various Hotels in the area that are within walking distance of the main drag.

The story published in the London Guardian (“Sarah Palin drops 2012 presidency hint with staff visit to Iowa”) took me utterly by surprise because although it is a pleasant story, it appears to be a factual exaggeration of the true story.

I spoke with the Rabbi on Thursday. On Friday morning when the Rabbi went to the synagogue, he told a couple of people that I had called him up to discuss arranging a Sabbath in Iowa to promote Palin. Well, the next thing the Rabbi knows, he received a phone call from a reporter at the Washington bureau of the London Guardian newspaper asking him questions. The Rabbi was kind of amused, but wasn’t sure what they wanted because he had never had a reporter call him before. He told the reporter what he knew, but then the reporter began speculating about the meaning of what the Rabbi told him, to which the Rabbi kept saying, “maybe, I don’t know.” The reporter took those maybes as affirmatives, and that was the basis of the story in the Guardian.

Perhaps the larger lesson of this story is that regardless of what the Establishment GOP may think, there are so many grassroots voters who are enthusiastic about a possible Sarah Palin 2012 run. We’re excited about volunteering for her and are willing to do whatever we can to help her succeed.

• November 15th, 2010 2:50 pm ET
• By Dr. Michael Williams, Conservative Examiner

A New York Times Columnist, Paul Krugman, touched the third rail of Obamacare Sunday, while on ABC’s ‘This Week’ when he made a statement confirming the need for ‘death panels’ as a means of containing health care costs (see video). Krugman is not the first person who has advocated the use of ‘death panels’ and yet liberals excoriated Sarah Palin for pointing out that the Obamacare bill contains what many on the left have said needed to be done.

During the discussion, which was about the Deficit Commission’s recent recommendations on cutting expenses, Krugman made his statement in response to when discussion would take place concerning the commission’s recommendations. He stated, ‘Some years down the pike, we’re going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sale’s taxes. Its going to be the; we’re actually going to take Medicare under control and we’re going to have to get some additional revenue from a VAT.’

Krugman’s statement was not the first time he has suggested the use of death panels as a cost saver. He made a similar statement on ‘This Week’ earlier this year and the panel received his statement with laughing in affirmation that death panels would save money. The interesting thing is that he went on to say that economists that he talked to agreed that death panels would have a ‘major cost saving.’

After the show, Krugman, whose byline on his blog is ‘The conscience of a liberal’, wrote on his blog an entry entitled ‘Death Panels and Taxes’ where he went into greater detail about how ‘death panels and sales taxes’ will and should be relied upon. He also points out this is not the first time he has said this. In an earlier opinon piece, he points out how those pushing to cut spending are meeting the efforts to control health care costs with the cries of ‘death panels.’

Krugman is not the first liberal to call for death panels. Robert Reich, a very liberal former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton who is now an economics adviser for Barack Obama, made a more bold statement concerning the same when he gave a speech on September 26th, 2007 at U.C. Berkley. In it he said, ‘We’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.’ His statement was frighteningly received with applause and cheers from the U.C. Berkley crowd of mostly students.

For those who think it would never come to this or that only limited applications of this thinking could apply, one only has to look at Europe as to what can happen when amoralists adopt death as a way to save money. Conditions used to justify killing of infants such as spina bifida, which many people live with and have productive lives, is legal in the Netherlands. Some, such as John Harris, a member of the official Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University in the UK, are even suggesting that because abortion is legal, what should stop the killing of a child just because they are on the other end of the birth canal.

How can some call health care a ‘right,’ then laugh about how using ‘death panels’ to eliminate a living person’s right to live and receive their health care ‘rights’ to sustain their life in order to save money? The answer is simple, when liberals elevate state sanctioned privileges to that which our Creator has defined as rights, then real rights are no longer safe when money gets tight.

Finally, while people can debate the ways to reduce health care costs, the left should never again ever refer to anyone as making money ‘on the backs of the poor’ when what they are advocating is the literal ‘stabbing in the backs of the poor’ to save money. The bigger debate that needs to take place is how America sold it soul to evil can even think that a solution to saving money is to tell old people to just die.

If you want to hear more about why classical conservatism is the only right solution and why progressive liberalism is the wrong solution click on the subscribe button at the top of this page. Then share your perspective either way by commenting or asking questions below.

Dr. Michael Williams writes for both the national Conservative Examiner and the local Albuquerque Family Examinercolumns. You can follow him on Twitter: @drmlwilliams. To learn more about him or to see a comprehensive list of his articles and other published works go to drmichaelwilliams.com.