EVEN THE EDITOR OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

a premier neo-con paper, doesn't buy the "death panels" agit-prop.

Is The Health Care Ire Part Of A Larger Anger?
August 15, 2009
NPR, Weekend Edition, Saturday

Guest host David Greene speaks with Matt Continetti of the Weekly Standard about the political news of the week.

GREENE: I want to ask you about a phrase that got a lot of attention this week: death panels. It was a term used by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to describe a provision that, if enacted, would have covered end-of-life counseling under government health care programs. Why did this seem to strike a nerve with people even if it wasn't exactly an accurate description?

Mr. CONTINETTI: Well, Palin has a talent for striking nerves. But this language was very visceral and it galvanized the entire country. I think for a couple of reasons. One, it evoked - even though it's mistaken - I mean there are no death panels…

GREENE: Right. We should make that clear.

Mr. CONTINETTI: …in any of the bills in Congress - it does evoke this specter of government rationing of health care. Which, I mean, you know, the Obama administration has alluded to toward bending the cost curve, for example. And this is something that people just dislike very much.

And the second thing is that it evokes a discrepancy between different spheres of decision making, right? People want to decide for themselves how to go about getting living wills, how about - to talk about end-of-life issues with their doctors. This is something they want to decide. And they're very uncomfortable with the government either instructing them how to go about it or incentivizing doctors to bring it up with people.

And this is a larger concern that I think most people have with Obamacare, which is that it's substituting local decisions with national ones, centralized ones made by our Congress here in Washington, D.C.