Sarah Palin's Lies About Obamacare Are Based on Religion

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Once again, flailin' Palin mangles the facts. I'm not for federally subsidized healthcare or the so-called public option, either. But the way to fight well-meaning but overwrought healthcare reform is not to lie about what's on the table, nor to grossly mischaracterize its components.

That, of course, is what former Gov. Sarah Palin did online, making up a story about President Obama's nonexistent plan to create a "death panel":

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called President Barack Obama's health plan "downright evil" Friday Aug. 7, 2009 in her first online comments since leaving office, saying in a Facebook posting that he would create a "death panel" that would deny care to the neediest Americans.

Once again, former Governor Palin is letting her religiosity cloud her thinking. She and others of the Schiavo ilk read into the Bible that the public should pay for life support even when there's not a remote possibility that the life in question is salvageable. We don't need healthcare reform to resolve that problem. All we need do is shift the cost of sustaining the living dead to the people who insist on keeping them on life support. And I don't mean to their insurance companies, I mean shifting that cost to the individuals themselves.

Watch how quickly they would vote to "pull the plug" if they had to spend decades working to pay the true costs.

I like the way Monsignor Charles Fahey, 76, a Catholic priest who chairs the board of the National Council on Aging, phrased the way he would decide on when to pull his own plug:

"We have to make decisions that are deliberative about our health care at every moment," Fahey said. "What I have said is that if I cannot say another prayer, if I cannot give or get another hug, and if I cannot have another martini—then let me go."

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