Fearing Fear Itself

After the Terri Schiavo spectacle a few years ago, many people started thinking about living wills, health care proxies and other methods of avoiding the same nightmarish limbo. So when the health-care reform bill was introduced in Congress last month, it included a provision (section 1233, pages 424-434) extending Medicare to cover "advance care planning consultations" should you choose to discuss such options with your doctor.

Eminently sensible. After all, making it easier for you to plan ahead for such a tragedy is a good thing.

But that was before Sarah Palin, former governor and present full-time provocateur, seized hold of the section and mangled it into something out of the Holocaust. Screaming about nonexistent "death panels" and raising the equally imaginary specter of killing off the elderly and disabled, she lied and lied and lied, scaring the pants off people solely to advance her political ambitions and gain street cred with the GOP.

(Of course, Palin would not be Palin without some rank it's-OK-for-me-but-not-for-you hypocrisy. You see, last year she proclaimed "Healthcare Decisions Day in Alaska," praising the exact same things she now denounces. Why am I not surprised?)

As if on cue, the airwaves were promptly filled with equally dishonest shrieking. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and others all fear-mongered about how the bill supposedly decides which Americans would get the axe. The fact that it wasn't in the bill, would never be in the bill and indeed would never be considered by anyone in their right mind was irrelevant. There were people to terrorize and cheap points to score.

In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In 2009, fear has won. In an unconditional surrender to mindless demagoguery and lies, the Senate Finance Committee yesterday stripped the provision from the bill. Senator Charles Grassley claimed it was dropped because it could be "misinterpreted or implemented incorrectly."

By him, perhaps? Grassley had lied to his constituents only the previous day, depicting the section as "a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

It was so incredibly false the thesaurus does not have enough words to convey just how false it was.

And yet it worked.

Yes, you have been protected from the horror of being able to decide your own fate without having to worry about paying the cost of the decision. If you want to plan ahead for a possible future, you're on your own.

And to everyone who terrorized their fellow Americans with blatant untruths - let's just wait and see what happens. God forbid you or your loved ones wind up condemned to exist in mute suffering, unable to express anything, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. All because in the name of partisan politics you made it harder for everyone to plan ahead.

Way to go, guys.