...Guess who said it?
Here's a hint; it wasn't Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, OR Rush Limbaugh.
It was Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labour under Bill Clinton, when describing the effects of Gov't-run healthcare
to an audience for whom "we're going to let you die" was an applause line.
From today's Wall Street Journal;
'We're Going to Let You Die' - WSJ.com
Quote:
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]
"Also, I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid--we already have a lot of bargaining leverage--to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [applause] Thank you."
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Video:
Please note that this speech, delivered to a predominantly left-collectivist audience in Berkeley CA, elicited
applause when Mr. Reich, quite bluntly and cavalierly, admitted that as of 2007 part of the acknowledged consequences of a Gov't-run healthcare plan was, I repeat, "
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] "
Turns out some of the "death panel" fears aren't just coming from the Right...and they may be, if not well-founded, at very least not conjured out of this air, because under what Mr. Reich describes above,
somebody is going to have to decide when someone's "too old" and the treatments "too expensive," and that that person should be denied medical care and allowed to die. I've been attempting to make this point for some time now on this board and others:
When you go on television and tell people you're going to kill them, kidnap their children, and eradicate their culture, they get a little worried. When you then call them crackpots, insane, liars, dupes, "astroturf" or whatever else the insult-du-jour is among the Left for those who disagree with them, you do not change their minds. All you do is cement in those minds the apparently reasonable fear that you are, in fact, going to do those things, and that you expect them then to thank you for it. This is not conducive to the "civility" the collectivist Left in this country alleges to desire; people are ill-inclined to be civil when you brag about killing them off and rendering them social untermenschen on television, and even less so when they discover that while you were promising to save them to their faces, you were planning to kill them behind their backs.