Sarah Palin has weighed in against Obamacare, worrying that centralized control over what is (and is not) covered could result in rationing against the most weak and vulnerable. From the story:
Palin, in her first policy statement since resigning as Alaska governor, wrote on her Facebook page Friday afternoon that the sick, elderly and disabled would suffer should healthcare be rationed, as conservatives claim it will with a public option. “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,” Palin wrote.
I think that is a real danger, given the power of “quality of life” thinking among mainstream bioethicists likely to be on the centralized planning boards and, as we have noted here, the beliefs of some of President Obama’s primary health care advisers. But the term “death panel” is getting too heated to be effective in persuading, except with those who already agree.
Then, Palin takes the step too far:
“Such a system is downright evil.”
That was unduly incendiary, and unnecessary to her p0int. Consider: Nazism was downright evil. Slavery was downright evil. Obamacare–as wrong as I think it is–doesn’t come anywhere close to those levels of malign human behavior. Besides, if you present your case properly, it is wise to trust your audience reach their own conclusions. Such talk plays well to the gallery, but I don’t think it helps win the debate.
Here’s a link to the entire Palin statement from The Corner.
August 8th, 2009 | 8:21 am
Although I’ve usually appreciated what Sarah Palin has to say and think she has a lot to offer in the way of being a female role model and advocate for the handicapped, I have to agree that her statement was too incendiary to be effective. What disappoints me is that she could have made the same statement without the words evil and death panel and made the same point. To be fair, Sarah Palin just articulated the worst of what we are all worried about, just so bluntly that people who would otherwise be sensitive to these concerns could be turned off.
August 8th, 2009 | 11:14 am
Reagan would disagree with you. He saw Evil, the Evil Empire, rememeber? He called it was it was. Where’s the Evil Empire now?
August 8th, 2009 | 11:45 am
Sorry to disagree with you, Wes, because you shoulder more of the burden of confronting these broken ethics than anyone, but what Palin describes, as she describes it, is evil.
Something does not have to rise to the grand scale of slavery or Nazism to be either implicitly or explicitly evil.
Evil can find a place in a ten-year-old child who has failed to form a conscience, and very dangerously so. A government taking on itself the power to make life and death medical decisions, something it is unqualified for and has no business being involved in, and doing it within a postmodern ideological format, is implicitly evil.
I don’t happen to be a Palin fan, but she hits the nail on the head. If we don’t want what will effectively be euthanasia, we had best not study our responses to the point of engaging in euphemasia.
August 8th, 2009 | 12:11 pm
Yes. Palin’s great gift, it seemed to me, was her ability to smile and reach the people where they lived about matters of common concern. But all the unfair attacks have gotten under her skin, I think, and now she is just shooting from the hip.
Leaders need to plan what they say very carefully, they need to lift up their followers toward higher levels of understanding and better means of discourse. Lately, she has seemed more like an angry blogger than a substantive politician. And that is hurting her. Badly.
August 8th, 2009 | 12:48 pm
William Z and Martin: Thanks for weighing in. But I think you both prove my point. That language is only going to appeal to the already convinced. It won’t convince anybody who doesn’t see it that way. Indeed, it can make the unconvinced think that the opponents are just a bunch of nuts. In fact, I think it plays into Pelosi’s hands.
Moreover, the Soviet Empire was of a different category altogether than Obamacare. One could legitimately call the Soviet system evil, but I think it devalues the word to speak of Obamacare was evil.
August 8th, 2009 | 2:36 pm
Wesley J. Smith,
You may be right about the political prudence and effectiveness of Palin using the rhetoric she has (though in my opinion, even if you are right, an inconsistent standard is being applied in our public discourse, since our recent national leaders–including Obama–have sometime used similarly inflammatory rhetoric about their opponents and opposing ideas).
You also seem to be making a claim on the grounds of substance, not just political prudence, and there I think your apparent position is far less tenable. I don’t see how you can support the claim that applying the word “evil” to Obamacare is “unworthy of substantive debate,” and even devalues the word “evil.” In order for that to be the case, it would have to be patently false that Obamacare is evil. If the substantive criticisms launched against Obamacare are accurate, then it seems at least arguable that this proposal is evil, even if in a more restricted sense than some other things (like some policies of the Soviet Union). The only way I can see your position making sense substantively is if we limit the use of the word “evil” to some sort of “super-evil,” which seems like a devaluing of the reality of evil (as I believe was already indicated in Martin McPhillips’ comment). I can’t be sure about the immediate political effectiveness of Palin’s specific comments, but at some point one must call things what they are. Avoiding doing so may be effective in a short-term political crisis, but in the long term I suspect it contributes to public acceptance of some evils, which have been described to the public repeatedly in allegedly more neutral descriptive language, rather than being called what they are.
August 8th, 2009 | 2:59 pm
I have to respectfully disagree with you about Palin calling this evil. One of the big reasons that the culture of death has come so far around the world is precisely because people are unwilling to call things what they are. They have been cowed into not calling evil what it is.
There is great power in calling things for what they are, and the present situation is a case in point.
August 8th, 2009 | 4:29 pm
“A government taking on itself the power to make life and death medical decisions, something it is unqualified for and has no business being involved in, and doing it within a postmodern ideological format, is implicitly evil.”
Is it any less evil when insurance companies do it?
August 8th, 2009 | 5:53 pm
I’m looking through the bill –
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.3200:
– for the best excerpts we can use as examples of what our concerns are. Has anyone already isolated the “juiciest” parts among the 1,030+ pages so that opponents don’t have to say “I’ve heard that” or “such-and-such says that…”?
August 8th, 2009 | 7:00 pm
I’ll tell what’s truly evil. Supporting the likes of Sarah Palin, knowing that she was a heartbeat away from the Oval Office. A true Ditto-Head as commander and chief! Are you aware that here husband hates America, that he wants Alaska to secede? Do you guys get to pick and choose what types of terrorist you like and agree with?
As far as your opinion on the health of America, I see you all prefer “WealthCare”.
August 8th, 2009 | 8:09 pm
Wesley I agree with Steve Cornett, and am rather suprised that you of all people don’t see the real “evil.”
IMHO, Palin calling it what it is isn’t as much of the problem as most (the unconverted), actually being unable to recognize evil.
If deciding life and treatment issues by “worth and economics” isn’t evil at its core, I’m not sure what is.
Who but God has a right to such decisions?
August 8th, 2009 | 10:09 pm
Re: Sam
I’ll tell what’s truly evil. Supporting the likes of Sarah Palin, knowing that she was a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
No. True evil is voting a man in office because you want he evil things he supports to become entrenched in law, such as taxpayer funded abortion and euthanasia. Palin supports none of these things; Obama does.
Or is it because of her “lack of experience?” If so, why didn’t it bother you that Obama had no experience at all in any executive position?
Are you aware that here husband hates America, that he wants Alaska to secede?
Maybe it’s not that he hates America, but loves Alaska enough to think it might be better off outside of Washington D.C. control.
And you know what? He might be right!
But in any case, there is nothing evil about loving your region of the country and recognizing what might be better for it. That’s called patriotism (misplaced or not), not terrorism.
But of course it’s only typical for liberals to declare evil those who oppose the things they want to make normal.
August 9th, 2009 | 10:14 am
HW: You’re right, evil is evil. But at least insurance companies are not a government people elect thinking it will do their will and protect them, and up to now insurance has been a matter of choice, whereas everyone is stuck with the government, which now wants them to be stuck with insurance whether they want it or not.
Wesley: She’s right. I understand that you like the idea of moderation, but she’s right, and it has to be said. I like her more and more the more to the point she is. I’ve already seen what she is talking about happen, in a hospital where even the chaplains termed what the hospital was doing evil, and Obama wouldn’t have gotten to the White House if the country weren’t full of idiots who are themselves evil. And I mean full of them. I’ll spare SHS examples, but trust me, I’ve seen what I’ve seen and I know what I’m talking here. Good for Sarah Palin for speaking truth.
August 9th, 2009 | 10:19 am
I might add, Wesley, that I don’t see YOU winning the debate. These aren’t issues for debate, even. They’re about life and death. That’s what wars get fought, not debated, over. Good for Sarah. Even if she did shoot a poor innocent unsuspecting moose that was minding its own business and had no chance even to try to run for its life from an airplane to feed her family when I don’t approve of miscegenation (the Eskimo husband) or of having unsupervised (the teenage daughter) children or have any particular affection for Down’s Syndrome offspring. DESPITE all that, GOOD FOR HER.
August 9th, 2009 | 10:45 am
Wesley: It does NOT play into Pelosi’s hands. The only reason Pelosi got to where she is is that there’s been too much “nice” (in this judaeo-christian culture that represents the destruction of truly great civilizations which preceded it) which has allowed “liberalism” to run amok and no one has had the GUTS to say “evil” for far too long.
As for debate, that’s like making the mistake of going a single word beyond “no” to a salesman or to a backseat “suitor.” No means no. No debate, just no. Slam the door or get a shotgun if necessary. That’s all they’ll understand. Similarly, evil means evil. And it has to be said, and what it represents has to be crushed. I thought Reagan overdid it with the axis of evil business, but then I never liked Reagan from the getgo because of the Christian Right which supported him and destroyed the Republican party even further than New York State “liberal Republicans” already had started to do. (Not to mention his annoying wife, despite her having the brains to hire an astrologer and his having the brains to comprehend astrology, she’s still annoying.) Debate doesn’t belong in the war against the culture of death any more than religion belongs in politics or has anything to do with the war that has to be fought against — not debated over — the culture of death, which is to be soundly defeated, not debated.
August 9th, 2009 | 10:53 am
And HW: You’re right about the insurance companies. I’ve been saying all along that every time the government “wants to reform health care” who’s really behind it is the insurance industry, which ends up the sole beneficiary. I’m all for getting rid of all the insurance companies, the whole system. And while we’re at it getting rid of Obama, this administration, the idiocy that supports it, and any notion of government involvement in health care, period. I knew Medicare and Medicaid were a bad idea; they “worked so well” that we’ve got the mess we’ve got now, between them and the insurance companies which are only too happy for them to exist. It had to be Democrats that started Medicare and Medicaid; well, what to expect from them anyway. As for the insurance companies, it’s always been my position that anyone involved in and with them in any way should be put out on an ice floe. A very large, very crowded ice floe, and the result would be a smarter, better society where the elderly are safe. Sarah Palin, by the way, might want to reconsider the way her husband’s people traditionally handled their elderly. But she’s not perfect. But she’s right on this.
August 10th, 2009 | 10:26 am
“Is it any less evil when insurance companies do it?”
Yes, it certainly is. Insurance companies are businesses, not governments wielding the power of law.
Governments literally have the power to redefine the meaning of good and evil for their own benefit, and they do it, always, “for the common good.”
That’s why you don’t want to give any government the power over health care. You can’t so easily quit them and switch to another provider once they take control of providing, and deciding who gets what and when. Conflating the familiar problems of dealing with insurance companies with what it will take to deal with the all-encompassing powers of government is the most serious mistake that proponents of “universal” health care insist upon making.
Also, government bureaucracies are the most static, incapable of adapting, slow-footed phenomena at large. From the moment a federal bureaucracy gets control of health care in the U.S., health care will begin to fall behind and deteriorate. Thereafter, all “efficiencies” will be gained through rationing.
For real reform, back the government out of health care. Its involvement has already caused costs to skyrocket. It is the cause of the problem it says it wants to solve.
August 10th, 2009 | 3:13 pm
Palin is correct. Obamacare is a packaged to include teh Culture-of-Death perrenial favorites of abortion and euthanasia.
His program is like including 5 sticks of dynamite under the hood of every new car. Choice indeed.
August 10th, 2009 | 10:20 pm
HW-it’s not any less evil, but that’s WHY many of us support healthcare reform. When I think of the kind of reform I’d like to see and would be willing to pay taxes for, I think of a health care system that pays special attention to ensuring that people with disabilities and diseases get all the care they need to live the longest and most fulfilling lives possible. In short, we have to make sure that any healthcare reform bill outlaws rationing and provides health care to such people, or health care reform will be a fraud.
August 14th, 2009 | 11:06 pm
Wesley: After reading all of the comments on this thread, I must say that I’m truly concerned with the information (or perhaps, the clarifications) that they’re receiving from you about this issue. I am very aware of your “culture of death” fears and respect them, even though I disagree with a certain number of them. But (and forgive my presumptiveness here) I think that deep down, you know that the end-of-life educational provision in this bill neither intends nor provides for “death panels.” I say this because (a) you’re an attorney who can readily understand the verbiage, and (b) you have in all likelihood actually read large portions of this bill.
That said, I think it is intellectually dishonest not to say as much in this forum of yours instead of merely criticizing the tone of Palin et al’s comments. It is primarily the substance of her comments that is most dangerous because it constitutes a fabrication. Whatever contempt she and others may have about perceived healthcare rationing, the “liberal” bioethics movement, or people who electively abort disabled fetuses, this bill does not provide for “death panels” or anything remotely resembling it.
That people who frequent this forum are so far to the right of you to the extent that they are skewering you for even questioning Palin’s sophomoric use of the word “evil” — I would think this level of insularity and invective would concern you greatly. In my experience you have always supported vigorous but reasoned debate supported by facts. Very little of that is taking place here at the moment, it seems.
August 25th, 2009 | 11:26 am
[...] surprise, “death panels” seems to have driven the Obamacare debate even though it was inaccurately applied by Sarah Palin, because the term captured a broader and reasonable fear among the populace–as I wrote at the [...]
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact