re: #648 Charles

Charles,
To me the whole death panel thing is NOT what Palin has said, it is directly related to HR 3200 provisions for panels to determine what are the “cost effective” medical treatments to be allowed.

This leads to the whole issue of Quality Adjusted Remaining Years (QARY), and if you need $20K in medical treatment and that will buy you 3 more years of quality life, and a year of quality life is determined by one of these panels to be worth $5K, then you only get $15K of benefit from $20 K of medical treatment. Treatment DENIED. You don’t get 3 more years of “quality life”, you get nothing but what amounts to a death sentence by denial of treatment that would extend quality life for you.

The panel is not killing you, it’s just not giving you treatment that would save you.
Don’t like the death panel terminology? Fine. But the practical effect of the issue is what we should be debating.

HR 3200 doesn’t specify QARY analysis, but it does point to something that is either that or substantially similar to that.

Obama won’t address that matter directly (or even indirectly), he just tosses the issue off as a lie and leaves it at that.