President Obama simply needs to say this as soon as possible.

"An amendmdnet offered to the health care bill by Senator Isakson has been used by some to argue there is a provision creating so called Death Panels that decide who among the elderly or ill get medical care. It there is such a provision in any health care reform bill I will veto it. There will be no Death Panel. Period. End of discussion."

Gee, Sarah, can I use these Death Panels to separate my dining area from my living room? Does Ikea carry them?

What a bunch of horseshit.

On a more serious note, my wife is an RN in an orthopedic floor in a major metro hospital ... Hip & knee replacements, and motorcycle accidents are a lot of their business.

I'm not there, so I'm not going to estimate a percentage, but I hear all too many stories of elderly folks who are there for some physical issue ... yet the mind is just not functioning. Dementia, it's called. They don't know their own names in the worst cases, they certainly don't know your name, or what year it is, or anything like that. A lot of them spend their time cursing and angry, others are depressed and withdrawn. Presence of the family matters little to these patients, though sometimes there are flashes of recognition, sometimes one family member is persistently mistaken for another family member.

But the presence of the family matters tremendously to some of the family members, who are doing their best to keep up a caring relationship ... and essentially get a slow-motion nightmare/torture/whatever bad word you want to call it, as they watch their loved one exist in a land of discomfort where no outsider can, effectively, reach them.

Is this what you want for yourself ??? Is this what you want for your loved one ??? Why am I the first to bring this up in any blog (that I have seen), why is this like totally forbidden to be mentioned in the mass media or in public discussion ??? Do we understand what we're doing to Grandma by keeping her alive in this state, do we understand how our taboo against any discussion of any variety of a "wish to die" prevents us from even knowing about, let alone finding some palliative or solution for, the thousands and thousands of our elderly relatives who are suffering this senile dementia and their family members who have to watch them suffer?

I don't know what that "solution" is, I'm not proposing mass killing of the demented senile. Yet for me, it sure gives me a strong desire to stay OUT of the clutches of modern medicine, and to know the simple, fairly painless means of death that are available to those that wish them, before things get anywhere near that bad.

Oddly enough our culture considers any death to be abnormal, as if we could all live forever if only we got the right care. Making it even more odd, so many people think this is a "Christian nation", but if you are a Christian, death is not an undesirable end to life. I'm just old enough to remember when people actually lived their lives knowing that they could die tomorrow, from accidents, or from diseases. When "tomorrow" showed up, they tried to accept the inevitable end of life with dignity. Today, it looks like we all want to spend every last cent we have, plus every last cent we can get from our insurance and our families, just to delay that inevitable end of life for another few days. Both my wife and I have sworn that we will not do that.

The allegedly pro-life religious right, if it really was pro-life wouldn't sit back and let 30,000 babies die every year. They have to come up with these canards in order to justify their failure to be "pro-life" when it means they have to give something instead just demanding sacrifices by others.

My father signed the living will. Without counseling and assistance, I was confused and didn't get it notarized correctly. Luckily, he was able to die with dignity, but had anyone checked, the living will that allowed me to not seek a higher level of care was not really legal. My cousin asked for her grandfather to be slowing weaned from his life support equipment under the impression this was easier for her, but, again in the absence of any real information, I don't know if she actually made his death harder.

On a television drama I saw 30 years ago, a character explained her desire not to receive any extraordinary treatment, saying, "God has already made his decision."

I believe it is seriously mistaken to conflate the “death panel” idea with the health care bill provisions to support end of life counseling. I believe the counseling provision is but a small part of citizens’ concerns with “death panels.” Of much greater concern is the Obama administration’s proposal to create a commission, the Independent Medicare Advisory Commission (IMAC), appointed by the president to make final determinations re what procedures will be paid for by medicare, under what circumstances, and at what rates of reimbursement. This commission would be specifically mandated to reduce medicare expenditures. These critical medicare decisions, now made by Congress, would be taken away from our elected representatives, and given to bureaucrats accountable to the President.

The medicare cuts that have been called for by Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget are in excess of $500 billion. We are told that this will be achieved by eliminating “unnecessary tests,” eliminating only the wasteful expenditures. Most people realize that cutting $500 billion will of necessity mean dramatic reductions in the actual delivery of medical services to the people who need them. The group that has been most often identified as the “target” for these cuts are elderly people with terminal illness, where the cost saving scheme would be to provide more palliative care instead of more costly medical procedures that may add only six months to a year to life expectancy. Or even elderly people who are not ill but who may only benefit from a hip replacement for a couple of years because they are old. These are the kind of medical “ethics” issues on which Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of Obama’s top medical advisors, has written extensively. Emanuel is infamous for writings such as his advocacy that scarce medical resources be allocated according to principles he calls “complete lives,” which would provide young people in their 20s and 30s with two or three times as much access to scarce medical resources as would be available to senior citizens. (See pp.428-429 of “Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions,” The Lancet, Jan 2009).

A panel of appointed bureaucrats, not answerable to congress, whose mandate is to reduce medicare expenditures by hundreds of billions of dollars, populated by behaviorist crackpots such as Ezekiel Emanuel, is what a lot of people would consider to be a “death panel.” If Obama and Orszag need to cut costs by $500 billion, let’s start with reversing the bank bailouts. Instead of the backdoor sweetheart deals that the administration has made with Big Pharma and the hospital industries, and continuing to line the pockets of the big health insurers, we should have a single payer system like the rest of the modern world.

Louise, I am in no way attempting to actually get my face, or my political party, into ordering others how to live.

I am questioning our majority culture here in America, where our un-stated assumptions condemn Grandma to this un-dignified way to go. I do assume it is un-wanted even by most who end up suffering through it, and I hear enough of my wife's struggles to help these people get to the darn bathroom that even if I have written books about giving each person their own ability to judge their life -- and I have written that book -- I just have a hard time believing that anyone wants to end up that way.

And yet they do. By the thousands. Every day, in America, which we once believed was the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I admit, I don't know where to go with it. I do wish we could discuss it more freely, and that these kind of truths could make it onto America's broadcast & cablecast networks, where there is most certainly an ethic of denying that Grandma ever suffers in the institutions we have designed for her.