Jeb Bush, defending his efforts to keep alive Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman, when he was governor of Florida, suggested on Friday that patients on Medicare should be required to sign advance directives dictating their care if they become incapacitated.
A similar proposal by President Obama — that doctors should be paid to advise patients on end-of-life decisions — became a political firestorm in 2009, when Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate, claimed that the legislation would give bureaucrats the power to decide if some frail or disabled people were deserving of medical care. The assertion was shown to be false.
In 2010, Medicare tried to add a regulation that would permit “voluntary advance care planning” during yearly checkups. But after an uproar, President Obama’s administration pushed to drop that provision.
Mr. Bush’s suggestion that advance directives be required under Medicare showed how much public opinion has shifted on the subject since.
Oh it has, huh. Or maybe, Maggie Haberman, IOKIYAR.
So death panels are now a totally cool thing called “Medicare end-of-life directives.” I’m sure this won’t be the last thing that President Obama proposed and was destroyed by media pissing and moaning that Jebya here will be able to get away with.
Wonder why that is.
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I’m sure this won’t be the last thing that President Obama proposed and
was destroyed by media pissing and moaning that Jebya here will be able
to get away with.
Actually, that is the point of all this suffering and death: the Republican scorched earth tactics, in victory as in defeat, are intended to demonstrate that nothing good will be allowed to happen so long as a Democrat is in charge. All you have to do, to open the door and let the goods things out of the vault, is to put the Republicans in charge. Then presto: life will be good again for a big chunk of the American Electorate, just like it was before the Great Society and Women's Liberation and Gay Rights.
The genius of the McConnell strategy of delay and obstruct and sabotage, following upon the Gingrich strategy of delay and obstruct and sabotage, is that so many people are so tired and so poor and so disappointed and so hopeless that while they may not exactly vote for the Republicans they will neither stand in their way - and if a trickle of prosperity happens to reach the crowd, the Democrats will be shut out of Washington for a generation.
As you can guess, I am extremely pessimistic about our prospects next year. Either this economy really gets fired up, so we can win on fundamentals, or we are going straight down the tubes.
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