This is from “best of the web”: Blogger Tom Maguire digs into the question of whether ObamaCare will entail the establishment of “death panels,” as Alaska’s former governor Sarah Palin fears. Maguire finds this April interview with David Leonhardt of the New York Times:

Obama: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80% of the total health care bill out here.

Leonhardt: So how do you—how do we deal with it?

Obama: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

So Obama says that there will be a “conversation” that is “guided” by experts, that “the country making those decisions” and then he says the experts guidance will not be “determinative.” Troubling here is that he first says that the decision (about life or death) will be made by “the country” and then he vaguely implies that the decision is “yours”. But is this the royal “you — the country” or “you-the idividual”.

No wonder people are wondering what he actually means, since he says it three ways: (1) The country decides, (2) the experts guide the country, (3) the experts guide you and you decide (where we cannot be sure who “you” is, is it “me” or is it “the country”.

If you ask me, Obama envisions a panel of experts who will design a highly rationalized set of algorithims which will be used to determine each individual’s priority number in a queue waiting for a treatment or a medicine. Rationalized rationing. Is that bad?