In 2009’s debate about federal health care legislation leading up to the eventual passing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare), Alaska’s Republican Governor, Sarah Palin, coined the term “death panel” as a name for committees of bureaucrats that she claimed would decide whether elderly people or children born with disabilities would receive health care or not.
Other Republicans jumped to reinforce this false notion, purposefully fostering hysterical fear among the conservatively-inclined public, and the myth could not easily be dispelled. For 2009, the “death panel” concept was named as PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year“, one of FactCheck’s “whoppers“, and the most outrageous new term by the American Dialect Society.
Ironically, it isn’t Democrat-built committees in Obamacare that pose the threat of determining the death penalty for vulnerable members of the public who are in need of medical assistance, but the Republicans. Under the current drives to repeal the ACA, numerous estimates indicate that many Americans will lose their health insurance, and as a result will die much sooner than otherwise. An LA Times article reported that anywhere from 28,000 to nearly 100,000 people in the United States are likely to die as a result of repealing Obamacare.
As another way of putting it, the Republican’s repeal of Obamacare would likely kill as many as nine to thirty-three times as many Americans as were killed in the 9/11 attacks.
Isn’t it ironic that the Republicans essentially lied about so-called “Death Panels”, but their own knee-jerk drive to revoke Obamacare is precisely the very evil thing that they ranted that the Democrats were creating? We probably should not be surprised at this ironic hypocrisy, since the Republicans have wanted to kill Obamacare with knives since it first came into being. It’s tragically funny that they’ve had years to prepare for this, but their healthcare replacement plan seems to have been no more sophisticated than to just “repeal Obamacare”.
If the GOP keeps it up, innocent blood will be on their hands — and not due to the death panel myth they earlier fabricated about Obamacare.
(Our “Real Death Panel” meme image sports the YouMurderer BB Font, and presents Republican legislators Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Ted Cruz as some of the main members of the GOP responsible for relentlessly pushing to repeal the ACA just to gain political points at the expense of human lives.)