Sarah Palin, the Republican Party's favorite wackjob quitter, has chimed in on the health care debate:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
These "death panels" are, of course, sheer hysterical fantasy on Palin's part. But news reports show there is a government program out there killing patients. It's not Barack Obama's Federal government, though. It's Sarah Palin's Alaska.
A July 14th article in the Anchorage Daily News titled "Troubled Alaska health programs face federal restriction" tells the story:
State programs intended to help disabled and elderly Alaskans with daily life -- taking a bath, eating dinner, getting to the bathroom -- are so poorly managed, the state cannot assure the health and well-being of the people they are supposed to serve, a new federal review found.
The Federal government has had to stop the state from treating new patients entirely:
The situation is so bad the federal government has forbidden the state to sign up new people until the state makes necessary improvements.
Things had reached the point where patients were dying for lack of treatment--more than 200 of them:
A particularly alarming finding concerns deaths of adults in the programs. In one 2 1/2 year stretch, 227 adults already getting services died while waiting for a nurse to reassess their needs. Another 27 died waiting for their initial assessment, to see if they qualified for help.
Now, Palin and her Republican apologists might argue that the very idea of a government program was fatally flawed--that any state Medicare program would have the same issues.
But most state Medicare programs don't seem to have this problem. It's just Alaska:
No other state in the nation is under such a moratorium, according to a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The problem is not that the Medicare system is flawed. The other 49 states are administering the program just fine. The real problem is that the Republicans in the Palin administration can't do their jobs.
This is the underlying reason for Republican hostility to government: they're projecting their own inadequacies and incompetence onto the concept of government in general. They aren't hard working enough or smart enough or brave enough to provide decent health care to every American, so they say it flat-out can't be done. Never mind that every other prosperous country seems to be perfectly capable of doing a better job of it than we do.
It's never made sense to elect Republicans who say they don't believe in government. If you hire a plumber who says they don't believe in plumbing, you're not going to get anything but a lot of backed-up toilets. It's time to stop sloshing through the backwash of the Bush and Palin administrations and put our whole-hearted support behind professionals who want to get the job done.