Howard Dean Admits Obamacare Includes Death Panels

When Congress debated Obamacare, pro-life advocates and Republicans like Sarah Palin were castigated for claiming the government-run health care program would include death panels that would ration health care treatment.

Now, former presidential candidate Howard Dean has essentially admitted they were right and is calling for the repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday he called the IPAB “essentially a health-care rationing body” that he believes will fail.

“There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting — the essential mechanism of the IPAB — has a 40-year track record of failure,” Dean wrote.

Dean, who is a healthcare industry representative as a senior adviser at the law and lobbying firm McKenna Long & Aldridge, said his experience as governor of Vermont turned him off to government control of healthcare prices.

“What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients,” Dean wrote.

http://www.lifenews.com/2013/07/29/...re-includes-death-panels-wants-them-repealed/

 

Does PolitiFact owe Sarah Palin an apology?

In December of 2009, Politifact, a left-wing website that poses as an objective fact checker, awarded former Alaska governor Sarah Palin its "Lie of the Year." Politifact claimed that Palin's use of the term "death panel" to describe the rationing that will come with ObamaCare was the biggest whopper of '09:

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.

"Death panels." …

[Palin's] 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?"

Yes, really.

And Democrat Howard Dean agrees. In a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, Dean writes:

One major problem [with ObamaCare] is the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.

Here is what Palin wrote four years ago:

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.

If what Dean fears comes true, specifically that "IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them," it takes no leap of logic or faith to fear which expensive and/or experimental procedures will not be covered.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/07/29/Howard-Dean-Politifact-lie-of-the-year