Do you remember when Former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin warned us about the upcoming Death Panels in Obamacare?

She wrote the following on her Facebook Page on August 7, 2009,

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no!

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.

All of “the smartest people in the room” laughed themselves silly, all the while assuring us that Gov. Palin was terribly wrong.

They lied.

The Independent Patient Advisory Board, a part of Obamacare, is set up to be a 15-member panel. Three members are to be chosen by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate, with the remaining three chosen by Obama and the executive branch. All of the members then have to be confirmed by the Senate.

The IPAB comes into play if Medicare costs are projected to go beyond economic growth plus an additional percentage point in any given year.

Evidently, San Fran Nan was right. Those idiots had to pass Obamacare so that they could see what was in it.

And now that they’ve seen it, Death Panels are perfectly acceptable, at least according to Anthony Mirhaydari, in an article he wrote for MSMMoney.com, posted on March 20th of this year:

If we’re going to end this slide into the fiscal abyss and stop the intergenerational heist, we need to address both the cost of care and the fact that so much goes to giving a few more days of low-quality life to the terminally ill. These resources could be better spent preparing the way for those just starting in life, while still providing our seniors with a more dignified end.

Bipartisan support does seem to be coalescing around means-testing for Medicare benefits, so that those who can afford it pay more. That’s great, but we also we need to encourage increased use of hospice care while discouraging repeated and outrageously expensive hospitalizations.

Think that’s inhumane? This heartbreaking New Yorker story by surgeon Atul Gawande about the current state of end-of-life care will change your mind.

And consider what you’d do if you had to pay those expenses out of pocket, as so many young families have to. Death is inevitable. Would you impoverish your family in an ultimately unsuccessful fight against it?

We need to celebrate our mortality, appreciate how delicate the balance between life and death is, and understand that a better life and a longer life aren’t necessarily the same thing — especially if it consumes resources desperately needed by the generations to come.

Didn’t I see that scenario in the classic movie “Lifeboat” (1944), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Talullah Bankhead and William Bendix?

In the movie, a chic writer, a stoker and others drift with the U-boat captain who has sunk their ship. Through cruelty and debasement, a deadly survival of the fittest scenario unfolds, until only a few are left to be rescued as the movie ends.

Is this what America is headed for? “A survival of the fittest”?

The Republican Leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives do not want to play that game.

Yesterday, Sen. McConnell and Speaker Boehner sent a letter to President Obama to inform him that they would not be participating in the nominations for the IPAB.

The following is an excerpt from the letter they sent:

In order to allow supporters to claim that the law’s Medicare cuts would be realized in the future, it tasked IPAB with reducing payments to providers or eliminating payments for certain treatments and procedures altogether. These reduced payments will force providers to stop seeing Medicare patients, the same way an increased number of doctors have stopped taking Medicaid patients. This will lead to access problems, waiting lists and denied care for seniors.

The unfortunate result is that decisions which impact America’s seniors will be made in the absence of the democratic process, without the system of checks and balances that would normally apply to important matters of public policy. Yet your recent budget called for expanding IPAB by tasking it with making even larger cuts to Medicare than those called for in the health law, even though the trustees of the Medicare program have told us that IPAB’s provider cuts would be “difficult to achieve in practice,” because of the denied care that seniors would experience.

You know, I had heard the Democratic Party called “The Party of Death” before, due to their heinous adoration of the murder of babies, still in their mothers’ wombs. However, it really hit home for me when they passed the monstrous legislation known as Obamacare.

Now, I am not saying that every single Democrat is a heathen, but why did the majority of them oppose putting references to God in their Party Platform at their 2012 Convention?

And, the cold, calculating rationale of those Liberals like Mirhaydari, just boggles the mind.

I know that it will never happen, but all those whose laughed when Gov. Palin warned us about the Obama Death Panels, owe that lady an apology.

And, Obamacare needs to be repealed…STAT.

Until He Comes,

KJ