Is Obama At It Again – Lying About Support for “Death Panels”?

2009 August 18

tags: Barack Obama, death panels, health care reform

by Jason A Clark

It’s starting to seem (ok, maybe not starting) that President Obama is having a hard time keeping his stories straight. One day he supports something, the next day he doesn’t. One day he promises something, the next day he breaks the promise. He’s like a teeter-totter.

This time the confusion lies in Obama’s stand on the Sarah Palin named “death panels.” Where does Obama stand on that issue? Don’t worry if you aren’t sure. It’s getting hard to tell these days…

August 16, 2009
Obama’s Talking About His Grandmother Again; People Who Listened Last Time Are Now “Dishonest”

The AP and the Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times cover Obama’s town hall on Saturday, where he told the story of his own grandmother to illustrate a point about health care. Since Obama is re-spinning the lesson he took from that experience this creates a bit of awkwardness for the Times, as we will explain. Let’s also admire the courage and honesty with which they address it. From the Times:

To Promote Health Care Plan, Obama Talks About His Own Grandmother
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — As President Obama wages his public relations offensive to sell Americans on the need for overhauling health care, he is using a familiar tactic: trying to make the political personal by putting a human face on a complicated and sometimes abstract debate.
…

On Saturday, he added a personal story of his own, citing the death of his grandmother to push back against unsubstantiated claims that he wants to establish government “death panels” that would deny care to elderly patients.

“I just lost my grandmother last year. I know what it’s like to watch somebody you love who’s aging deteriorate, and have to struggle with that,” Mr. Obama said. “So the notion that somehow I ran for public office, or members of Congress are in this so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma? I mean, when you start making arguments like that, that’s simply dishonest.”

So on Saturday in Colorado the point of Obama’s story about his grandmother was that he was opposed to any sort of government role in “pulling the plug” on her or deciding that some treatments simply didn’t pass a societal cost/benefit test, and to suggest otherwise was “dishonest”. “Dishonest”?

That is very much at odds with Obama told the David Leonhardt of the Times in April when he talked about his grandmother. Here was the lesson he took away from her experience back then:

THE PRESIDENT: 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 percent of the total health care bill out here.

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

THE PRESIDENT: 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 in April Obama favored some sort of government sponsored panel that would help assess treatment options with one eye on the patient’s quality of life and the other eye on the public purse. Any guidelines would be voluntary, but of course, lots of people, presumably including doctors, can be persuaded to volunteer to follow a certain path if the alternative is a careful government review of all of their procedures. By way of example, plenty of doctors voluntarily limit their patients access to opioid painkillers, in order to avoid scrutiny from the DEA.