Why is it so hard to be charitable to Sarah Palin? Read this column by Charles Krauthammer. Like so many others, he thinks Palin was speaking literally when she used the expression "death panels." She was not; or rather, if we don't know whether she was, we should be charitable and assume she wasn't. What Palin was drawing attention to with this pithy term was age-based rationing of health care. Even if no current health-care bill specifies that care will be rationed by age, that is the spirit that animates the bills and arguably the direction in which they will take us.
Has Krauthammer (a trained physician) not been reading the bioethics literature? Does he not know that President Obama's health-care adviser, Ezekiel Emanuel, has advocated age-based rationing? Palin, as I interpret her, is making a slippery-slope argument. There may be nothing intrinsically wrong with offering end-of-life consultation for aged patients, but that is the first step onto a slippery slope. At the bottom of the slope are . . . death panels, i.e., bureaucrats who decide which demographic groups are eligible for which care.
Contrary to what you may have heard (or been taught), there is nothing wrong, per se, with slippery-slope arguments. Some are cogent and some are not. Whether a particular slippery-slope argument is cogent depends not on its form but on its content—on whether the slope in question is, as claimed, slippery. Perhaps it is not; perhaps we can go part of the way down the slope without sliding all the way to the bottom. Palin, to her credit, has induced people to think about this. She's saying that we're headed toward death panels and asking us to reflect on whether we want this. If we don't, then we need to act now, before it's too late.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 