re: #132 Kenneth

That is exactly what will happen. In the Canadian system, chronic underfunding has lead to scarce resources: too few doctors, too few hospital beds and limited number of services. The result is rationed care. Hospitals are allotted a given number of procedures per year. They are compelled to decide who gets the treatment & who does not. That why we have 1 million people on waiting lists for surgery. And the waiting list continue to grow, not shrink.

The hospital panels make life & death decisions, whether you want to call them “death panels” or not.

Krauthammer’s last paragraph:

It’s not an outrage. It’s surely not a death panel. But it is subtle pressure applied by society through your doctor. And when you include it in a health-care reform whose major objective is to bend the cost curve downward, you have to be a fool or a knave to deny that it’s intended to gently point the patient in a certain direction, toward the corner of the sickroom where stands a ghostly figure, scythe in hand, offering release.

Yes.