Paul Krugman Recommends 'Death Panels' to Help Balance Budget

[Religious Dick]

Although he was likely taking a swipe at former governor Sarah Palin with the reference, Paul Krugman on Sunday recommended "death panels" as a means of helping to balance the federal budget.

In a Roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said of what recently came out of the President's deficit commission, "Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/checker.aspx?v=hdSUSUaGnz

RUTH MARCUS, WASHINGTON POST: Right now, 75 percent of people believe you could balance the budget without touching Medicare or Social Security; 75 percent of people believe that you can balance the budget without raising taxes. Well, you could, but it would be extraordinarily painful.

People need to get a little bit of reality therapy. There's going to be another dose coming on Wednesday when another group is going to submit their recommendations, very concrete recommendations about how to do it. That's the conversation we need to have before we start picking apart solutions.

PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: If they were going to do reality therapy, they should have said, OK, look, Medicare is going to have to decide what it's going to pay for. And at least for starters, it's going to have to decide which medical procedures are not effective at all and should not be paid for at all. In other words, it should have endorsed the panel that was part of the health care reform.

If it's not even -- if the commission isn't even brave enough to take on the death panels people, then it's doing no good at all. It's not educating the public. It's not telling people about the kinds of choices that need to be made.

A few minutes later:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: But what is going to happen? I mean, are you clear on where a compromise is going to be? It's got to be discussed before the end of the year, no?

KRUGMAN: No. Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes. It's going to be that we're actually going to take Medicare under control, and we're going to have to get some additional revenue, probably from a VAT. But it's not going to happen now.

So, we've got to get Medicare under control by deciding "what it's going to pay for...which medical procedures are not effective at all and should not be paid for at all."

AKA "death panels."

Now, to be sure, Krugman was likely being derisive using that term. However, the point Palin and others were making during the ObamaCare debate - and getting great criticism from folks in the media for doing so - was that once government gets involved in these decisions, it's a slippery slope to federal officials determining who lives and who doesn't.

There are many medical procedures today that are costly and might preserve life for a short period of time. When Medicare decides it's not going to cover them, the government has indeed made a life and death decision for a citizen.

With that in mind, I imagine Sarah Palin will be smiling somewhere when Krugman's comments are brought to her attention.

*****Update: Our good friend Gary Hall reminds us in the comments section that former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich made a similar observation back in 2007:

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.


Read more: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/11/14/paul-krugman-recommends-death-panels-help-balance-budget#ixzz15KA7XFTA

[Plane]

I don't undestand how "death panels" are possible to avoid if the government becomes single payer.
We actually have some experience in the subject.


Check out this NPR article I heard a few days ago.

What Dialysis Taught Us About Universal Health Care[26 min 48 sec]

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=131167638

Robin Fields, welcome to FRESH AIR. Now, you say that this program of dialysis that we have now is considered by some to be the closest we've ever come to socialized medicine. In what way?

Ms. ROBIN FIELDS (Senior Editor, ProPublica): Well, actually, a doctor that was speaking to an editor of mine once referred to it as socialized medicine for an organ.

It gives comprehensive coverage, under Medicare, for all patients who suffer from the same condition, which is kidney failure, and it not only covers their dialysis and their transplants, it actually covers all of their medical costs under a sort of a fixed reimbursement system that goes through Medicare.

GROSS: Now, you write that a program, this dialysis program, once envisioned as a model for national health care, has evolved into a hulking monster. In what sense has it become a hulking monster?

Ms. FIELDS: Well, for one thing, it's hugely larger than anyone could ever have imagined. There are far more patients. There are far more complicated patients. And the expense of it is wildly beyond the expectations of the architects of the program.

GROSS: It's kind of amazing that this dialysis program became an entitlement during the Nixon administration because right now, Republicans are so opposed to health care reform. And, you know, Republican President Nixon signed this entitlement. Congress passed it in 1972. What were some of the reasons behind the passage of this entitlement?

Ms. FIELDS: I think that you hit on a really interesting point there, which is that the mindset of the country was very different. And the expectations were quite different, I think.

I think this kind of care was born in part just out of compassion. Here was a chronic illness, and there was a treatment for it, but most people were not getting it simply because of money. And I think that there was a moral imperative there to step in and do something in the sense that it wasn't right that in the wealthiest country on Earth that that was happening.

Immediately after the passage of the program, the country went into a fairly deep recession, and it's possible had it gotten somehow pushed off the agenda and delayed that they wouldn't have done it.

Also, the role of government and the role of government in health care really has become a subject of very heated debate in the years that have followed, whereas at that point in time, there was actually enormous consensus to do this and to do this particular program, although obviously it was perceived as a very small and localized program.

GROSS: One of the things this program was a reaction against is an actual life and death committee at a medical center that was, what, screening who was and who wasn't eligible for treatment with dialysis?

Ms. FIELDS: Yes, and was the subject of a hugely famous and very moving story in Life magazine back in 1962. It was simply the model of rationing.