Health Policy Analyst and known moron Sarah Palin has posted written testimony to the New York State Senate Aging (Euthanasia) Committee, and continues to insist that death panels are not imaginary.  Of course, she has gone through the work of reading relevant legislation and extensively footnoted her statement, because intellectual rigor is what she is known for:

A great deal of attention was given to my use of the phrase “death panel” in discussing such rationing.[7] Despite repeated attempts by many in the media to dismiss this phrase as a “myth”, its accuracy has been vindicated.

Read more »

If we read the colonic bag correctly, the “public option” is dead. Even if it passes the House, it won’t survive the conference committee. Instead, some future public plan will be “triggered” if certain standards aren’t met after a suitably long period of time.

Long enough, that is, for those standards to be suitably weakened. Or for whatever public option eventually emerges to be suitably hobbled.

None of which matters, since it has no more basis in reality than a campaign promise. Much like the promise that led us to hope something worthwhile might be accomplished this year.

Instead, the immediate, practical question is this: How much will the healthcare “reform” fuck us over?

Read more »

Could this be Mean Jean’s macaca moment?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YshG_Ok8idc

This might be the worst GOP talking-head performance yet:

This is getting tiresome:

Well, there is another political leader, higher up in the hierarchy that used that than I did…And then the Washington Post, or some newspaper later on said something about Sarah Palin. Well, Sarah Palin said that presumably before I said it, about the death boards…But if you figure, if you connect several dots, you got, the concern about saving money in this health care bill, you’ve got the concern about a public option leading to a government run health care plan, and then you got the Veterans Administration putting out a book saying that all of the doctors have to deal with end of life issues for everyone that is in that system, and then you’ve got all of that put together. And quite frankly, between government running everything and paying a doctor to give that advice, everybody figures that the government is going to be in the middle of end of life issues just like they are in England, as an example.

Read more »

Poor Ben Alexander. A World of Warcraft enthusiast, he had to drop out of the University of Iowa after spending “16 or 17 hours a day” playing online, instead of, you know, studying. Or attending classes. Or taking tests. “School wasn’t interesting,” he says.

But Ben found help — at ReSTART, a “residential treatment center for Internet addiction” near Seattle. Now instead of blowing away opponents or otherwise obsessively indulging in “pathological computer use,” Ben is baking cookies.

Good for Ben! Free at last from oppressive MMORPGs! And all for the low, low price of only $14,000 for a 45-day stay. But no cheating — “Internet addiction” isn’t an official shrink-wrapped disorder, so insurance doesn’t cover treatment.

Poor Ben’s parents.

Internet addiction center opens in Fall City [Seattle P-I]

This is why Chuck Grassley should be beaten senseless:

ROBERTS: Welcome back to the most news in the morning. How far would you go to get good health insurance? One man who lost his job and medical benefits reenlisted in the Army just to get his family covered and then he paid the ultimate price. This is a story that you’ll see only here on CNN.

Read more »