The Ghost of Terri Schiavo
NPR’s headline on yesterday’s town hall on health care by President Obama:
Obama Says His Health Plan Won’t ‘Pull The Plug On Grandma’
The NY Daily News had a similar headline using that quote in this morning’s print edition, as does this Reuters item; the NY Post less delicately shortens the headline to ‘WE WON’T PULL PLUG ON GRANNY’.
This is not the place the White House wanted to be in right now. Even George W. Bush, as many things as his opponents threw at him and as low as his approval ratings went at times, never felt compelled to … well, as Jake Tapper put it,
[I]f the president finds himself at a town hall meeting telling the American people that he does not want to set up a panel to kill their grandparents … perhaps, at some point, the president has lost control of the message.
I’ve previously covered one of the primary reasons why Obama is in this pickle: he doesn’t have a clearly defined, easily and consistently explained plan. There are still multiple bills, none of which has the unambiguous support of either the White House or a working majority in both Houses of Congress; the bills are massively long and complicated, yet for the most part they leave huge numbers of unanswered questions by deferring important decisions to vaguely-constructed and questionably supervised bureaucracies. Many of the worst things in the bills are not what they say they will do, but what by silence they would permit to happen. The absence of a ban on using federally-provided insurance funds for abortions is one example, as noted by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in explaining why the USCCB (long a supporter of more government funding for universal health care coverage) can’t support the House bill:
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Popularity: 21% [?]
Male, retired and the rest is of little interest to anyone. The site keeps me busy and if it helps others to stay abreast of daily events then my time is well spent.
Jack Says:
Watching my stats I’m aware that people are following this story and so they should. On an earlier version of this site I was watching closely and I did NOT agree with the judge’s decision as they put her to sleep.
Now that argument is coming back to bite Obama in the ass.
We’ll see how it goes.
Posted on August 13th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
nomdeblog Says:
Life and death needs a debate beyond Roe vs. Wade and the abortion issue. State support of life or death is a moral issue not just a political rally cry for special interest groups.
With all kinds of wonderful medical procedures extending both life and quality of life beyond what science fiction used to portray; we need to understand what this means to our society from a moral standpoint and from an economic standpoint.
Ironically it is usually the conservatives who talk about the morality of these matters. The socialists mostly see it as the redistribution of “other people’s money” … it’s mostly Orwellian economics .. some are more equal than others…i.e. Congressmen won’t be subjected to ObamaCare for the proletariat, they’ll have a Cadillac plan.
In other words Health Care is rationed. That needs to be on the table, ironically with the patient.
Posted on August 13th, 2009 at 7:11 pm