Now, as the workplace vax wars rev up, the best point to keep in mind is offered up by reader Michael Andreoni:. We willingly did it to ourselves. The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.
Show caption. By Danny Westneat. Danny Westneat: dwestneat seattletimes. Danny is taking a personal leave from The Seattle Times through the end of Skip to main content. A must-read political newsletter that breaks news and catches you up on what is happening. Most Popular - Easy to read, daily digest of the news from The Hill and around the world. The Hill's must read political newsletter that breaks news and catches you up on what happened in the morning and what to look for after lunch.
Delivered to your inbox every weekday evening, our politics and policy newsletters are a daily digest of today's news and what's expected to break tomorrow. National Security. He said the phrase invokes images of Nazi Germany, which denied life-saving care to people who were not deemed useful enough to broader society. Adolf Hitler ordered Nazi officials to secretly register, select, and murder handicapped people such as schizophrenics, epileptics, disabled babies and other long-stay hospital patients, according to Dowbiggin.
On Aug. In the weeks that followed, health care policy experts on both the right and the left said the euthanasia comparisons were inaccurate. Gail Wilensky, a health adviser to President George H.
Bush, said the charge was untrue and upsetting. You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life; you ought to have counseling 20 years before you're going to die.
You ought to plan these things out. And I don't have any problem with things like living wills, but they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines you're going to pull the plug on Grandma.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, asked about the issue on This Week with George Stephanopoulos , said, "You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in America who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.
Democrats responded by saying the accusation wasn't true and highlighting the actual Medicare provision and what it said. That wasn't necessarily an effective strategy, said Drew Westen, a psychologist who studies political communication and advises Democrats on messaging. People intuitively understand that health care reform is about lowering costs, and end-of-life care can be quite costly, he said. The "death panels" claim exploited fears that people already had.
Rather than just saying the claim wasn't true, Westen said, a better response would be that there already are "death panels" — run by insurance companies. The charge was raised repeatedly during August town hall meetings.
The town hall meetings highlighted the partisan divisions when it came to death panels. The claim, along with the Tea Party movement, excited the Republican base to mobilize a vocal opposition, Rother said. Two independent polls showed that about 30 percent of the public believed death panels were part of health care reform, both the week after Palin made the comment and a month later.
Yet seniors were no more likely to believe it than other age groups. The polls showed a closer correlation by party, with Republicans more likely to say that death panels were part of the plans pending in Congress. It's not clear whether Palin's comments swayed anyone who was undecided or unsure about health care reform. As the furor over the phrase settled down, Democrats used it as evidence that Republicans were unreasonably opposing health reform.
President Obama rebutted the claim in a major health care address on Sept. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren't so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.
The phrase has been mentioned in the Congressional Record about 40 times since Palin's Facebook posting, but virtually all were Democrats citing it as an example of Republican intransigence. Edward Markey, D-Mass. They grandstand with phony claims about nonexistent death panels. They oppose any real reform. Earl Blumenauer, the Oregon Democrat who promoted the provision that allowed Medicare to pay for doctor appointments about end-of-life counseling, said he sees both positives and negatives from the controversy.
On the positive side, he said he's optimistic the Medicare provision will make it into the final version of health care reform, which is still pending in the Senate, and people had more conversations about making their wishes known for things like living wills or do-not-resuscitate orders. On the other hand, he said, the episode suggests that political distortions need to be confronted faster and more forcefully.
That doesn't bode well for keeping average citizens involved in the political process, especially those who are independent or not particularly partisan.
That gives me pause. As for Palin, she told the conservative National Review in an interview on Nov. PolitiFact's calls and e-mail to Palin were not returned.
That leads, of course, to death. The phrase is "a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the 'evil empire.
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