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A tale of two professors and Sarah Palin on Obama's 'death panels'
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
08/09/09 11:52 AM EDT
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| Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gives her resignation speech July 26, 2009, in Fairbanks, Alaska. (AP Photo/Al Grillo) |
Sooner or later, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's critics are going to realize that, while her style of speaking drives them up the wall, they are spectacularly imprudent to assume she doesn't know what she is talking about. Consider the reactions of two prominent law school professors to this statement posted by Palin on her Facebook page:
"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."
Palin's reference to Obama's "death panel" inspired Prof. Harold Pollack to pen the following "have you no decency" witticism on The New Republic's health care blog:
"To be clear, it is downright evil to establish a 'death panel' that decides who is allowed to live based on their “level of productivity in society.” Less clear is what the heck Palin or Bachmann are talking about. I can’t find the words “death panel” in any administration position paper, the stimulus package, or the House and Senate draft health reform bills. Don’t take my word for it. Read the bills."
Of course, Pollack, who is a University of Chicago professor of social service administration, could as easily have said that there could not been any genocide in the Soviet Union, China or Cambodia because Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, and Pol Pot never used the term "death camp" in any official communication, either.
But another professor's reaction to Palin's statement demonstrates that Pollack's snark was too cute by half. According to Cornell University law school's William Jacobson, writing for the Legal Insurrection blog:
"These critics, however, didn't take the time to find out to what Palin was referring when she used the term 'level of productivity in society' as being the basis for determining access to medical care. If the critics, who hold themselves in the highest of intellectual esteem, had bothered to do something other than react, they would have realized that the approach to health care to which Palin was referring was none other than that espoused by key Obama health care adviser Dr. Ezekial Emanuel (brother of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel)."
"The article in which Dr. Emanuel puts forth his approach is 'Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions,' published on January 31, 2009 .... While Emanuel does not use the term 'death panel,' Palin put that term in quotation marks to signify the concept of medical decisions based on the perceived societal worth of an individual, not literally a 'death panel.' And in so doing, Palin was true to Dr. Emanuel's concept of a system which considers prognosis, since its aim is to achieve complete lives. A young person with a poor prognosis has had a few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life.
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