They aren't at all, given factual, historical reality. Not only have we had death panels themselves and the functional equivalent for decades, but the history of liberals and radicalism of behavior and compromise of ethics, and related tainting of euthanasia, is uncontestible fact and an open record. It's no surprise that there have been books written by authorities such as C. Everett Koop so many years ago (the 1970s) on just this issue, as well as related oceans of ethics-related material on all kinds of topics of this kind.

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This will sound cold since it doesn't apply to flesh and blood, but I don't think that anyone that cares much about anything wants to deliver bad news, whether it is a repairman telling someone that their hard drive is shot or a plumber that says the drain pipes are too thin to repair, fact is that things wear out and break — people, too.

Some people always accuse repairmen that care about things of being gleeful about it announcing “not worth fixing”, but that isn't the way I look at things. When I realize that things are a lost cause I usually cut them a break on my price which helps to salve my conscience.

Maybe I am wrong to do that. Maybe they don't care.

I have seen situations that I thought were unethical, in particular recently, a resuscitation that went on waaay too long, resulting in an alive (ie, with a heartbeat), but brain damaged, vented, quadriplegic. What that man went through as they tried to save his life, I wouldn't do to my worst enemy. But the family was standing outside the room the whole time, egging on the doctors.

What I've seen more than anything, is a reluctance on the part of doctors to deliver bad news to loved ones of a patient. They're human, too, and they don't want to be the one to confront a family with really bad news.

Define “serious.” Furthermore, don't think that because there are a lot of doctors in one place that things are much better, either for cost or for quality of treatment. That was the theory when Cuban doctors fled Castro and were handed Florida licenses when they showed up here. Didn't work out.

I grew up in a place where doctors were few, so I was used to the idea of waiting a few weeks to see a doctor.

I lived for a while in South Florida where there are way too many doctors. Seriously, you could call a doctor's office asking to make an appointment and be in and seen within an hour. I was shocked to find that out. Specialists like heart doctors were tripping over themselves for patients. Some even advertised, “Bad Ticker? We will See You Quicker!” (please excuse the exaggeration.)

Yet, Medicare payments for certain procedures are twice what they cost in less populated places like where I grew up. So convenience-wise, things are swell, but cost wise, not so hot.

Neither industry cares for anything but their profits so if their endless push for increasing them has negative effects for society at large we cannot count on them to do anything about it. So who will?

Frankly, Terry Schiavo was a wake up call to a lot of us concerning what happens when the same folks, who are falsely screaming 'Death Panels', are anywhere near the levers of power. They would keep everyone alive and hooked up to feeding tubes and other torturous devices; brain dead or no, expressed wishes or no, hope of improvement or no. It doesn't even matter if it bankrupts the country. They want to give dominance to their religious predilections over your body and you and your families finances. That doesn't characterize all the protest, but it characterizes a large enough segment to make it worth combating.

Don't confuse the rare irrational attack with intelligent concern about the nature of the people who are engineering our “reform,” as well as well-known facts, including the previous existence of death panels since the 1960s, and the equivalent (including ethics committees who can make “futility” decisions already), providing the infrastructure for what with some of these on the Left is a known slippery slope.

Overreaction to the protest, or dishonest mischaracterization of it, is self-defeating and self-discrediting.

In the show, they explain why. In shorthand, it's because when there are more doctors, then the bar for certain non-life saving procedures is lowered. Once again, this is because if “someone else” is paying, doctors and patients are more likely to say “Why not”? as well as the fact that the doctors have the time to do procedures that they would put off if they were busier.

As a medical professional, I can tell you what I see every day: everyone wanting Cadillac care with a Pinto payment. There are people in our hospital system who are eating up dollars to the extent that you could just go outside and burn them, and get about the same results. People who are not even US nationals, or who may be citizens but never paid in to the system, with million dollar plus hospital bills. Inevitably, they have a full code status: which means they may try to die, but we won't let 'em. And when you try and talk to the family, they refuse to consider anything other than full care. She could live another 20 years like this! If that family was responsible for even a fraction of the true cost of the care the patient received, they would be singing a different tune.

The short answer to the healthcare question: we are keeping people alive who should be allowed to die. I am not talking relatively healthy, intact people who will get better, and walk out of the hospital and have some quality of life. I am talking quadriplegics who are completely unresponsive, ventilated, on hemodialysis with tubes in every orifice, and some new ones we made for them. Or the 88 year old stroke/sepsis/demented patient whose family demands we do everything to save her. How about the 89 year old, deaf, blind and demented patient that got brain surgery for a brain tumor? We are slaves to the unrealistic expectations of the family, in so many cases, it's unreal. Let's face it, when you're not paying a dime for any of it, it's easy to say “Do everything!”

Healthcare doesn't need to be less expensive. We should all pay something for the care we receive. What healthcare should be is more evenly distributed so that dollars go to those who have a chance for real recovery. For the OLD old, the most humane and most economical option is hospice, in so many instances. Some on the things we do to patients, in the name of keeping them alive, would be considered torture in another setting.

But when you try and bring these kinds of issues to the fore, there's always someone shouting “DEATH PANELS!”, somewhere in the background.

They're much more activist and flirting with extremism (as anyone honest and healthy will tell you or will admit, even if he or she dislikes it), and they're so arrogant (or breathtaking sometimes with their level of ineptitude and being out of touch with everyone and everything) that they may actually assume they are immune to public disapprobation and election losses. However, the scope and extremity of some at least of what they are seeking has got to make them aware they can't get away with it and still get re-elected (even with traditional Democratic vote-total boosts of various illicit kinds), and to be safe they must defer at least some of the blatantly worse effects of what they are seeking for us. They hope to fool the easily fooled by presenting them in 2010 and 2012 with mainly “good” things, or at least to reduce the bad things they can expect to encounter. Some will, no doubt, find this convincing or satisfying, and vote Dem again.

Compounding this is the ineptitude as well as increasing mainsteam opposition to the shift leftward by the Dems in Washington. They are currently fractured and dysfunctional with health care “reform” (their attempt to have the federal government take over health care incrementally) and they need to recover their purposefulness (albeit for bad and wrong reasons, mainly) if they want to make ["]progress["] again.

It is a political trick. It defers the unpleasant consequences of the decisions being made, intentionally, until after the 2010 or the 2012 elections. It has an advantage in that it can be presumed to be most effective among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters (who then can respond primarily as a short-term measure to the good parts of what is sought, the gratification from which so many of them wouldn't want to defer or view critically, at any rate).