Sarah Palin’s reportedly ignorant belief that Obamacare cuts cost by way of a “death panel” of bureaucrats passing down coverage decrees is nearly as notorious as Palin herself. Mind you, Palin was being ridiculed for this long before The Krugman, a bearded novelty act who does a traveling show for The New York Times, sung the praises of government-rationed care in an ABC appearance:

Here’s the infamous paragraph from Palin’s 08/07/2009 Facebook post:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. 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.

Palin was responding, in part, to a statement by Rep. Michelle Bachmann, another crazed right-wing nut. If you have a memory or possess the power of Google, it’s not hard to recall the dinosaur media’s response. Smarmy leftists at The New York Times and MSNBC ranted and raved about lies and incited mobs, while slightly-better-hinged commentators settled for dismissing Palin’s thoughts as partisan nonsense.

Conservative pundits continue working to inform the public that Obamacare – sorry, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – relies exclusively on rationed care for the only cost savings that aren’t fabrications. As George Will details in a Washington Post op-ed, death panels by any other name are still terrible policy:

The point of PPACA is cost containment. This supposedly depends on the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, which is a perfect expression of the progressive mind, is to be composed of 15 presidential appointees empowered to reduce Medicare spending – which is 13 percent of federal spending – to certain stipulated targets. IPAB is to do this by making “proposals” or “recommendations” to limit costs by limiting reimbursements to doctors. This, inevitably, will limit available treatments – and access to care when physicians leave the Medicare system.

Will’s closing line is brilliant:

The essence of progressivism, and of the administrative state that is progressivism’s project, is this doctrine: Modern society is too complex for popular sovereignty, so government of, by and for supposedly disinterested experts must not perish from the earth.

So, Ohioans – have you signed a petition supporting the Health Care Freedom Amendment yet?

Follow me on Twitter: @jasonahart

Cross-posted at that hero and Third Base Politics.

If you’ve not read about the recent McKinsey & Company study investigating the likelihood of businesses dropping employee health coverage due to Obamacare, The Weekly Standard has all the gory details.

The study finds that, “Overall, 30 percent of employers will definitely or probably stop offering ESI [employer-sponsored insurance] in the years after 2014… Among employers with a high awareness of reform, this proportion increases to more than 50 percent.”

You didn’t actually believe President Obama when he promised you could keep your current coverage, did you? This particular mandate, of course, isn’t mandatory for government medicine’s loudest proponents, as summarized fiendishly by Karl Rove’s minions at Crossroads GPS -

Cato Institute writer Michael F. Cannon opines about one of Obamacare’s central cost-saving schemes, and why it’s destined for failure:

Inefficient providers have effectively killed nearly every pilot program that previous administrations promised would make Medicare more efficient. Suppliers of wheelchairs and other medical equipment have blocked efforts to reduce the inflated prices Medicare pays them. The industry has killed or sabotaged at least four federal agencies dedicated to researching which medical treatments don’t work.

Cutting costs is sort of a big deal, with unfunded Medicare obligations already totaling $24.8 trillion before Obamacare’s shady accounting and expanded entitlements kick in. Another Obamacare stick, Comparative Effectiveness Research, might reduce the cost of health care… while gravely damaging its effectiveness:

CER can be beneficial if used solely to inform doctors and patients to guide decision-making. However, the new law lays the groundwork for bureaucrats to use CER in Medicare to make coverage decisions and otherwise compel physicians to treat patients not according to what is best for the individual but according to what the evidence shows is best in most cases.

Back at The Weekly Standard, numbers from a Rasmussen poll of likely voters don’t look good for fans of socialized medicine.

By a margin of more than 2 to 1 (48 to 20 percent), likely voters think Obamacare would reduce, rather than improve, the quality of health care. By a margin of more than 3 to 1 (53 to 15 percent), they think it would raise, rather than lower, health costs. By a margin of 4 to 1 (56 to 14 percent), they think it would raise, rather than lower, deficits.

To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi’s immortal words: the more that we find out what’s in Obamacare, the more appalled we are that you passed it.

Bigger, more expensive, more intrusive government is not the answer to big government’s past and current failures in the health care industry. As responses to Paul Ryan’s budget remind us, Washington leftists have no connection to fiscal reality, no interest in personal freedom, and certainly no concern for the will of the voters.

Have you signed a petition supporting the Health Care Freedom Amendment yet?

Follow me on Twitter: @jasonahart

Cross-posted from that hero.