'We're Going to Let You Die'

Who said it? Hint: It wasn't Sarah Palin.

By JAMES TARANTO
Wall Street Journal
October 14, 2009 -- 3:58 p.m.

"She needs to go to hospital. Do you want that? Or would you prefer that we make her comfortable?"

.David Espo of the Associated Press is certainly excited about what the Senate Finance Committee did yesterday:

Historic legislation to expand U.S. health care and control costs won its first Republican supporter Tuesday and cleared a key Senate hurdle, a double-barreled triumph that propelled President Barack Obama's signature issue toward votes this fall in both houses of Congress.
Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute throws some cold water on the double-barreled hurdle-clearing of a signature-propellent, noting that lots of special interests--not just industry groups but unions, wealthy constituents of Democratic congressmen, and even coal miners--have reason to oppose this legislation. "Can President Obama and the congressional leadership satisfy [these] groups?" he asks. "My guess is, probably not, and this misguided effort at 'reform' will therefore die. Again."

Let's hope he's right. Meanwhile, if you're not part of a special interest but just a regular American who hopes one day to grow old (because it beats the alternative), NewsBusters.org has a timely reminder that proponents of "health-care reform" don't necessarily sympathize with that aspiration. NewsBusters links to another Morgen Richmond YouTube clip, this one of a speech that Robert Reich, who served as President Clinton's labor secretary, delivered on the subject in 2007:

I will actually give you a speech made up entirely--almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is, and a candidate will never say, but what candidates should say if we were in a kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship, and they were educated in terms of what the issues were, and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:

"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see
you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you--particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people--you're going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you.

"And by the way, we are going to have to--if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive, so we're going to let you die. [applause]

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