A tale of two professors and Sarah Palin on Obama's 'death panels'

"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."

According to Cornell University law school's William Jacobson, writing for the Legal Insurrection blog:

"The incoming fire has been withering, as usual. Palin is accused of becoming the 'Zombie Queen,' certifiably insane, 'clinically wrong,' and espousing a 'gruesome mix of camp and high farce.'

"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)."

"Put together the concepts of prognosis and age, and Dr. Emanuel's proposal reasonably could be construed as advocating the withholding of some level of medical treatment to a baby born with Down Syndrome. You may not like this implication, but it is Dr. Emanuel's implication not Palin's."

Put another, less charitable way than Professor Jacobson chose, the analyses of Palin critics would be more likely to be taken seriously if they displayed at least a modicum of intellectual honesty.

READ MORE