There are a variety of stories on this. Republicans are in some respects going too far with it, although in important ways they are quite right to be angry.
What is being offered is counseling, in effect, to encourage old people to not eat up a huge amount of resources on treatments that will only add a few months to their lives. I don’t have the time to look the number up, but some enormous percentage of our healthcare expenses are consumed in the last six months of life. It’s in the 25-50% range.
Think of the thousands it costs daily for Intensive Care, for various chemotherapy treatments, for respirators, for taking a dozen pills a day that each cost $20.
On the one hand, the people who provide these things have an enormous FINANCIAL incentive to continue the status quo, in which the actual costs of things are invisible to the people using them, and their families. This allows, at least potentially, huge profits to be made. Government can always be abused, since it is a system of allocation by fiat, and not by free market decision making.
At the same time, how do we reconcile the fact that we all die, with the ability we now have to prolong life for some period of time?
Ultimately, any system of medical care will have to ration it somehow. We cannot afford to spend, say, a million dollars a day for six months for every American. There has to be a point where enough is enough, and we just accept the inevitability of death. Religion–which the Socialists regularly do everything within their power to undermine and destroy–helps with this.
The question is who makes that decision. What the Democrats have done sneakily here is basically create a sales pitch in which the PATIENT is convinced of the need to end their own lives. This is not a death panel. The death panel will necessarily follow any government run healthcare system, but that is not what this is.
The significance of this story is simply that the slow erosion is patently already happening, in which Obamacare is slowly moulded in the darkness into something that is closer to the Socialists hearts desire. They didn’t feel the need to read the bill since they felt certain they could change it in the 5 years or so they gave themselves into something more congenial to their ideology.
This is the part we need to worry about. This is a process which is anti-democratic, as seen in the patent efforts of the supporters of this change to keep it secret. This is just the first of what have been planned as many steps. In itself, I don’t find this provision that objectionable. I find the PROCESS, however, HIGHLY objectionable.