From RadioVice:
PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Think about people on the right. They’re simultaneously screaming, they’re going to send all of the old people to death panels and it’s not going to save any money. That’s a contradictory point of view.
TAPPER: Death panels would save money, theoretically.
KRUGMAN: The advisory path has the ability to make more or less binding judgments on saying this particular expensive treatment actually doesn’t do any good medically and so we’re not going to pay for it. That is actually going to save quite a lot of money. We don’t know how much yet. The CBO gives it very little credit. But most of the health care economists I talk to think it’s going to be a really major cost saving.
There will almost have to be death panels, because the the whole project is so underwater fiscally already, before it's even started.
ReplyDeleteSoon we'll be told there is no greater service you could do for your country than to die before expensive care is needed. Krugman will be writing columns saying as much before long.
To be sure, the panels will have some Orwellian name, suggesting that they are, as Krugman says here, "advisory", and will refer only to saving money, not to indirectly killing people.
And we think political rhetoric is overheated today! When we start killing people to save a few bucks, things will get uglier than we've ever seen before, at least since the slavery battles of the first half of the 19th century.