Mike Madden at Salon writes:
The "death panels" are already here
Sorry, Sarah Palin -- rationing of care? Private companies are already doing it, with sometimes fatal results
Long before anyone started talking about government "death panels" or warning that Obama would have the government ration care, 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan, a leukemia patient from Glendale, Calif., died in December 2007, after her parents battled their insurance company, Cigna, over the surgery. Cigna initially refused to pay for it because the company's analysis showed Sarkisyan was already too sick from her leukemia; the liver transplant wouldn't have saved her life.
That kind of utilitarian rationing, of course, is exactly what Palin and other opponents of the healthcare reform proposals pending before Congress say they want to protect the country from. "Such a system is downright evil," Palin wrote, in the same message posted on Facebook where she raised the "death panel" specter. "Health care by definition involves life and death decisions." ...
-- Patricia Reilling opened an art gallery in Louisville, Ky., in 1987, and three years later took out an insurance policy for herself and her employees. Her insurance provider, Anthem Health Plans of Kentucky, wrote to her this June, telling her it was canceling her coverage -- a few days after it sent her a different letter detailing the rates to renew for another year and billing her for July.
Reilling thinks she knows the reason for the cutoff, though -- she was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2008. That kicked off a year-long battle with Anthem. First the company refused to pay for an MRI to locate the tumors, saying her family medical history didn't indicate she was likely to have cancer.
Strange how these kinds of private "death panel" decisions don't raise the objections from the right. Madden has a few more in his story, and diarists here at Daily Kos and elsewhere have catalogued plenty of the same. There's enough of this stuff to keep Foxaganda and CNN and ABC and every other cable and network outlet busy 24/7/365. But they'd rather make up stuff about how bad things are in Canada and how what they call socialism is gonna kill your grandma.