Sarah Palin may be the most powerful person in this country, which explains why so many progressives at the New York Times and elsewhere continue to attack her (often by attacking her family) nearly a year after she and John McCain lost the election. Almost single-handedly, with a post on her Facebook page, she altered legislation that would have allowed government bureaucrats to take quality of life into consideration in the allocation of scarce health-care resources. It now appears that another objectionable provision, the so-called public option, is off the table. Americans are speaking; their elected representatives are listening; democracy is working.
Addendum: I keep hearing it said that Palin's term "death panels" is misleading. Ha! Those who say this have no clue about how politics works. Politics is as much rhetoric as it is logic. It appeals to the heart as well as to the brain. It is about speaking the language of the people. In that two-word expression, she articulated what Americans find objectionable about socialized medicine, namely, the power it gives to nameless, faceless bureaucrats. Try to imagine the corruption that would ensue if government ever acquired the power to deny medical treatment on the basis of quality of life or "usefulness to society." Would the parent of a powerful politician get treatment that is denied to ordinary Americans? Would Daniel Callahan, the renowned bioethicist, get his "life-saving seven-hour heart procedure," even though he is 79 years old and has lived, by his own account, a "full life"? It's horrifying to think of the corruption such a program would facilitate.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 