Olbermann on the damage done by "death panels"

Last October, in a one-hour special commentary on health care reform, Keith Olbermann discussed his father’s illness in personal and graphic detail. Last night he provided an update that began: “Last Friday night my father asked me to kill him.”

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Olbermann and his father have had conversations about end-of-life care. He’s outraged at those who oppose this emotionally difficult but medically important event.

When Sarah Palin discussed “death panels” in her famous Facebook post, she was referring to a provision in the health care bill that would reimburse physicians for discussing end of life issues with patients. The inspiration for that post was Betsy McCaughey, the object of blame in Olbermann’s commentary.

And as I left the hospital that night, the full impact of these last six months washed over me. What I had done, conferring with the resident in ICU, the conversation about my father’s panicky, not-in-complete-control-of-his-faculties demand that all treatment now stop, about the options and the consequences and the compromise, the sedation, the help for a brave man who just needed a break. That conversation, that one, was what these ghouls … decided to call “death panels.”
Your right to have that conversation with a doctor, not the government, but a doctor and your right to have insurance pay for his expertise on what your options are when Dad says “kill me” or what your options are when Dad is in a coma and can’t tell you a damn thing, or what your options are when everybody is healthy and happy and coherent and you’re just planning ahead, your right to have the guidance and the reassurance of a professional who can lay that all out for you, that’s a, quote, “death panel,” unquote.
That, right now, is the legacy of the protests of these subhumans who get paid by the insurance companies, who say these things for their own political gain or like that one fiend for money. For money, Betsy McCaughey told people that this conversation about life and death and relief and release, and also about no, keep treating him no matter what happens, until the nation runs out of medicine, she told people that’s a death panel and she did that for money.
It’s a life panel, a life panel. It can save the pain of the patient and the family. It is the difference between you guessing what happens next, and you being informed about what probably will, and that’s the difference between you sleeping at night or second-guessing and third-guessing and thirtieth-guessing yourself. And it can also be the place where the family says, “We want you to keep him alive no matter what, we believe in miracles,” and the doctor says yes. Nobody gets to say no except the patient and the family. It’s a life panel, and damn those who call it otherwise to hell!

For those who may have already forgotten Betsy McCaughey, she wrote a New York Post opinion piece that claimed Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanual) recommended health care rationing based on age and disability. McCaughey was the inspiration for Sarah Palin.
The truth was, Emanuel had commented on rationing, but his remarks were clearly limited to decisions involving scarce transplant organs or inadequate supplies of vaccine. Thanks to the hysteria of “death panels,” however, we may not have any health care legislation at all.
According to Rolling Stone, Betsy McCaughey was paid to derail the Clinton health care plan back in 1994. If it’s any comfort, McCaughey resigned her post as Director of Cantel Medical Corporation after being humiliated by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

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