We're Not A Death Panel, But We Are Going To Let You Die

Just so there's no misinterpretation: I am absolutely in favor of death panels. I hope the death panel that decides my own case will refuse, on principle, to let my unproductive carcass be a continuing burden to the living. I've often thought, if immersive past-life regressions ever become possible, that I'd like to be a becchino, one of the disposers of corpses and near-corpses during the medieval plagues.

So I applaud diminunitive public servant Robert Reich's commentary on the need to let ailing people die, courteously discovered with great courtesy by James Taranto.

Reich, who never misses a chance to be sanctimonious and/or blue-nosed, aims to tell us the true truth rather than the political truth, and sure enough, he says something the Democrats would rather you not hear: The death panel concept did not originate in the mind of free-verse poetess Sarah Palin:

 

"We're going to let you die" is hard to interpret in any other context than that of a death panel. I know we're all post-modern and Lakoffian and "framing" and stuff, but when you say "we" you're still referring to a group, right? Presumably this group will include more than one person but fewer than six billion people. So if it's not a panel, what is it? A committee? A nation? A consultancy? A czar? A cabinet-level department or just an agency of HHS? A government-sponsored enterprise? A blue-ribbon commission?

Barring murder, accident and suicide, whoever pays for your medical care will have some authority over how quickly you die. If HR 3200 did not contain any discussion of death panels, that would be the scandal.