Health reform untruth

Editor: Just as Congress was getting closer to completing legislation to reform health-care insurance in America, critics of each bill written sprouted like dandelions on a green lawn. Each version of a legislative proposal has its own critics and each its own backers, but critics especially have grown more numerous, louder, ruder, angrier and ever more likely to shout and pound on the nearest table.

One message that has gained a lot of publicity is that of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Palin is the GOP’s current glamour girl who rode in on her white horse waving a banner urging us to resist our Evil Government’s Evil Death Panels.

Where did the idea of “death panels” come from? One version of a leading legislative proposal includes a provision for providing payment to doctors for end-of-life counseling. Such counseling would be helpful to seriously ill patients and their loved ones by providing useful information about what to expect as the sickness progresses and what treatments are available to either cure the patient or make his or her last days as comfortable as modern medicine can make them.Ms. Palin managed to spin that provision into a scheme to allow government to terminate lives, especially those of old people. What can this lady be thinking? Can we believe any such scheme would be proposed? By our own government? At this time in history? Anyone who would believe that such a proposal could even be seriously considered — much less proposed — is a certifiable wingnut.

Please, let’s all of us use our common sense and ignore Ms. Palin’s attempt to induce panic in Americans in order to get us to oppose much-needed reform of the health insurance industry.

Oz and Beth Grimes, Petaluma