Less than 50%
Podcast available at the link:
[
link to www.breitbart.com]
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin warned that the “diabolical” and “heartbreaking” treatment of the 23-month-old British baby Alfie Evans is an example of the “death panel”-like decisions Americans can expect under a fully “socialized rationed healthcare” system.
In a Thursday interview on Breitbart News Tonight with SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak, Palin cautioned that “this type of rationed healthcare controlled by government bureaucrats and politicians” is “the road we’re on” if the United States continues down the path towards a totally government-controlled socialized healthcare system.
Alfie Evans is a critically ill toddler who was recently removed from life support against the wishes of his parents by order of the British government, following a United Kingdom High Court decision on April 11. British authorities also denied the parents’ request to transfer their child to a Vatican-owned children’s hospital for treatment at the invitation of Pope Francis and Vatican officials who offered to cover the child’s healthcare and travel expenses.
Palin said, “The hospital and quote-unquote ‘health care providers’ won’t listen to the parents of Alfie, and of course the parents want to take all these offers from others to help their special needs child who will die under the care of this hospital that is adhering to the socialized rationed health care rules.”
Palin recalled her 2009 Facebook post in which she coined the term “death panel” to warn of the dangers of the Democrats’ push for a government-controlled healthcare system. She wrote:
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.
Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.
Palin reminded listeners that she had been “mocked” and “just about run out of town” for warning about “death panels” during the months leading up to the passage of Obamacare.
Left-wing PolitiFact described her “death panels” comment as its 2009 “Lie of the Year.” The comment inspired such heated debate that President Obama addressed her criticisms in a special joint session of Congress, where he said the idea “that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens” is a “cynical and irresponsible” lie. However, in the years following the passage of Obamacare, left-wing pundits and Democrats like Howard Dean have openly admitted that Palin was correct that the denial of live-preserving treatment is inevitable within a system of rationed government-controlled health care.
United States
