New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman didn’t call Obamacare’s death panels the final solution but
he came pretty close. He barely avoided Hitler’s terminology by
referring to them as the “real solution.”
Krugman’s
comment came last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with Christiane
Amanpour” as he discussed the U.S. debt crisis. “Some years down
the pike, we’re going to get the real solution, which is going to
be a combination of death panels and sales taxes,” he
said.
He criticized deficit hawks on the debt commission for
letting critics of the death panels give such a wise cost-cutting
device a bad name:
If they were going to do reality therapy, they should have
said, OK, look, Medicare is going to have to decide what it’s going
to pay for. And at least for starters, it’s going to have to decide
which medical procedures are not effective at all and should not be
paid for at all. In other words, it should have endorsed the panel
that was part of the health care reform. If it’s not even — if the
commission isn’t even brave enough to take on the death panels
people, then it’s doing no good at all. It’s not educating the
public. It’s not telling people about the kinds of choices that
need to be made.
Here we have the “conscience of a liberal,” which is the
name of Krugman’s New York Times blog. Sensing that he
needed to do some hasty mop-up work after his appearance, Krugman
posted an entry on the blog to “clarify” what he meant by death
panels: “health care costs will have to be controlled, which will
surely require having Medicare and Medicaid decide what they’re
willing to pay for — not really death panels, of course, but
consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much
we’re willing to spend for extreme care.”
But the stain of Krugman’s “real solution” isn’t so easily
expunged. Throwing the chatty aside, “Not really death panels, of
course,” or the euphemistic phrase “extreme care,” into the
explanation doesn’t change the bottom-line meaning of what he
originally said: that the rationing built into Obamacare translates
into de facto death panels.
Obama’s hoped-for legacy of expanding coverage to tens of
millions while somehow “reducing costs” will rest upon the graves
of the enfeebled and the elderly. This is the left’s final and real
solution to inconvenient health care costs once the federal
government carries them, just as death via abortion is its final
solution to inconvenient costs of “unwanted” pregnancy.
Progressives have worked very hard over the years to teach
American children to associate Hitler’s final solution with
“right-wing” autocracy, but in reality it came out of the very raw,
Malthusian utilitarianism the Krugmans espouse. Hitler’s final
solution began with death panels for the disabled, then expanded to
other “undesirables.”
The late British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge would have
called the death panels of Obamacare the “humane holocaust.” He
predicted that Hitler’s crimes would become a future generation’s
“compassion.” The liberals who coined the chilly slogan, “Every
child a wanted child,” will no doubt come up with a similarly
creepy one for the weak and elderly who need what Krugman calls
“extreme care.”
In this life nothing is certain except death and taxes,
goes the adage often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. In Old
Krugman’s Almanac, it is death panels and a sales tax. “I believe
that some day — maybe in the first Chelsea Clinton administration
— it will actually happen,” he wrote on his blog.
Meanwhile, Americans are already feeling the loving touch
of liberalism at airports. The ironies here abound: the most
exhibitionistic generation ever fears “naked scanners” while a
right-to-privacy, ACLU-friendly administration tells it to shut up
and submit to a frisking.
Under the logic of the nanny state, “equality” always
finds a way to swallow up freedom. In this instance, liberals feel
better about violating the freedom of all rather than contemplate
the awful possibility of violating the “right to privacy” of some
through profiling. Society has “progressed” beyond that
“discriminatory” measure, they say, and this great leap forward now
means that everyone gets to be treated like terrorist
suspects.
