“Death Panels” Just Won’t Die

The year was 2009. The month was July. The date was the 26th. That was the date Sarah Palin quit working as the Governor of Alaska, and startedpromoting chaos and misunderstanding in our political system. Just a week later on August 7, 2009 Palin posted that infamous note on her Facebook page. Without even attempting to justify or cite the legislation to which she made reference, she said the following:

“[G]overnment 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.[24

Wa-la! “Death Panels” were born. The suggestion of “death panels” was so outrageous, and such a false characterization of the Affordable Care Act, that this statement was deemed the “Lie of the Year” by Politifact.

Regardless of the fact that the notion of “Death Panels” has been shown to be a blatant lie, designed to arouse fear in the hearts of millions of uninformed people, some are not only still talking about it, but are actually indicating that the notion is valid. They are saying that the Affordable Care Act will result in “Death Panels.’ US House of Representative Steve King of Iowa, has asserted:

“And now, we’re looking at a socialized medicine system that takes away 17 percent of our economy and takes away your ability to manage your own health and puts it in the hands of the government and a panel of 15 IPAB bureaucrats that Sarah Palin correctly identified.”

King previously warned about government panels that will :

“make a decision on whether your life is worth saving”

as recently as last month, even though IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, does nothing of the sort. The panel, designed to come up with ways to contain the cost of Medicare spending, is by law not allowed to “ration health care” and has no oversight over individual cases.

Given the background of King, it should be of no surprise that he would promote this lie to the conservatives in Iowa. These are the facts:

1. King supported Todd Akin’s outrageous comment regarding the fact that women can’t get pregnant from “forcible”rape.

You remember his insightful explanation about how women just “shut that whole thing down.” King described Akin as a “strong Christian man” with a “wonderful family.”

2. Representative King doesn’t have a college degree.

3. In November 2010 King endorsed Michele Bachmann for House Republican Conference Chair.

4. As you might guess King is anti-abortion. He is opposed to affirmative action, and he believes that racial profiling is an appropriate tool for law enforcement to rely upon. He said on June 14, 2010, on the floor of the House of Representatives that:

“Some claim that the Arizona law will bring about racial discrimination profiling. First let me say, Mr. Speaker, that profiling has always been an important component of legitimate law enforcement. If you can’t profile someone, you can’t use those common sense indicators that are before your very eyes. …”

5. King not only opposes same-sex marriage, but when the Supreme Court in Iowa ruled that it was permissible, King advocated resignation of the Justices. He went further and said that the Iowa legislature should also enact “ marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca.” King, along with others, mounted a campaign against the retention of all three Iowa Supreme Court judges who ruled on the gay marriage case. King bought $80,000 of radio across the state calling for Iowans to vote “no” on the judges. Subsequently, all three judges were not retained.

6. In March of 2008 King commented on Senator Barack Obama and said:

‘I don’t want to disparage anyone because of their race, their ethnicity, their name – whatever their religion their father might have been, I’ll just say this: When you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States — I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam? I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror.”