Death Panels 2.0

With the "death panels" smear having gone down in flames, exposed for the monstrous lie it is, the right wing is taking another tack in attacking the Obama Administration - saying it wants elderly veterans to die.

Call it Death Panels 2.0.

All during the Bush Administration, the Veterans Administration distributed a booklet titled Your Life, Your Choices, educating veterans about advance care planning and encouraging them to discuss the issue with their families, doctors and spiritual advisers. Advance care planning, which became widely known after the Terri Schiavo fiasco, lets people dictate the terms of their health care in advance should they become incapacitated. For example, via a living will you can tell your doctors to keep you alive by any means needed, or you can direct that treatment be withheld. With a health care proxy, you can specify that someone else has the right to make health-care decisions on your behalf.

The point of such planning is that you control your treatment and thus spare your family from having to make painful decisions on your behalf. So it is thus not surprising that the booklet, first issued by the Clinton Administration and retained for twelve years, is being distorted beyond all recognition.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed and again on Fox News, Jim Towey called Your Life, Your Choices a "death book," saying that it "presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political 'push poll.' For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be 'not worth living.'"

If he genuinely believes veterans (or anyone else, for that matter) would tell their doctor to pull the plug based solely on a worksheet, he must really think they're morons.

Of course, since the booklet is freely available online, Towey exhibits the same haughty arrogance shown by other death-panel scaremongers - he apparently believes his readers are either too stupid or too lazy to look it up for themselves. Anyone who actually looks at the booklet quickly sees that the worksheet helps veterans consider their feelings about the subject and thus decide for themselves what treatment they may want done (or not done, as the case may be) if the worst happens. It does not favor one outcome or another. Indeed, it explicitly says, "You can help assure that your wishes will direct future health care decisions through the process of advance care planning."

So Towey is lying. But we already knew that.

What we didn't know is that for years, Towey repeatedly lobbied the VA to buy millions of copies of Five Wishes (his own for-sale "living will with a heart" booklet) but was turned down. So by smearing the free VA booklet, he's not only lying and fear-mongering, he's also trying to drum up business.

This is really terrible. Base political opportunism combined with scaremongering and crass exploitation makes for a very bad combination. Preying on elderly people is always bad, but preying on elderly veterans who have given their all for their country is particularly awful.