There are few things in the world more cynical that selling a health system based on a political (or command) economy as 'universal'. While it is tempting to attribute the wrecked lives that socialized medicine will impose on us, on the profound economic ignorance that seems to characterize Progressives and many liberals, the issue of end-of-life counseling makes it clear that they know exactly what they are doing.

When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1.

Why would such an innocuous provision, so easily dropped when it became a political liability, be reinjected into the remaking of the medical system by surreptitious Presidential fiat?

Every socialized medical system in the world was enacted and is maintained by a fraud. To this day, most Canadians will tell you that their medical system is 'morally' superior because 'everyone is covered'. The reality is of course, much different. Various schemes have been applied to ration scarce medical resources including making you wait long enough so you'll die in line.

One of the cruelest aspects of government-run health care systems in other countries is the degree to which these systems engage in non-price rationing of health care services. The hospital does not give out tickets or numbers; it just places the people it is reluctant to serve on a waiting list. Take the health care systems of Britain and New Zealand, for example. In both countries hospital services are completely paid for by government. Yet both countries also have long waiting lists for hospital surgery. In Britain, with a population of about 55 million, the number of people waiting for surgery is almost 800,000. In New Zealand, with a population of three million, the waiting list is currently about 50,000. In both countries the adverse effect on patients is about the same. Elderly patients in need of a hip replacement may wait in pain and discomfort for years. Patients waiting for heart surgery are often risking their lives. Canada is a country that has had a national health care program for only a few decades. But because the demand for health care has proved insatiable, and because the Canadian government has resolutely refused to increase spending beyond a level of about 8.5 percent of the GNP, the waiting lines for surgery have been growing. In the province of Newfoundland the wait for a hip replacement is about six to ten months, the wait f o r cataract surgery is about two months, for pap smears up to five months, for "urgent" pap smears two months, and for CAT scans two months. All over Canada heart patients wait for coronary bypass surgery, and the Canadian press is frequently reporting episodes of heart patients dying while on the waiting list.

The pervasiveness of this practice among so many socialized medical systems makes it clear that this is policy and not merely an unintended consequence, just as short-changing the elderly on medical care is also a policy.

Medicare statistics are revealing in this instance. 28% of expenditures went to just 6% of Medicare recipients who all died in the same year. It's just commonsense that people need more medical care in their last years than during their prime.

Of course, how are you going to tell an estimated 35 million voters that the government has decided that they lived long enough and should just go into the woods and die gracefully?

Not surprisingly, you blame it on Bush.

Democrats lie, and primarily they lie to each other. Kirsten Powers, a 'Democrat party strategist' (flunky) who is supposed to defend the party's positions, insisted, because this is what she was told, that the Obama administration was simply maintaining the end-of-life counseling provision first enacted by the Bush administration.

SCHLAPP: And government itself, let me tell you, the language here right, the language is different. They made the language worse, instead of doing this once every five years, now the Obama administration is allowing this to happen every year and actually reimbursing doctors to do it every year. So, that’s quite a slight of hand. And doesn’t government — aren’t they a little conflicted here? They have to find this huge health care savings for seniors at the same time they’ve become the counselors to seniors in their end of care decisions?

POWERS: Where was your outrage in 2008 when the Bush administration said that Medicare would reimburse end of life counseling?

SCHLAPP: It was a veto that was overridden by the Democrats. So, I give President Bush credit for vetoing that bill.

POWERS: No, it was a 2008 law. I mean, I don’t know what are talking about.

SCHLAPP: Yes, that became law over the president’s veto.

POWERS: No, that’s not true.

To Democrats, 'not true' apparently means 'contradicts the narrative'. Powers later had to acknowledge (by tweet) that she was in fact mistaken, even as other flunkies spokespersons, continued to maintain the fiction.

The upshot is that end-of-life counseling is more like Sarah Palin's 'death panels' that the Democrats would ever like to admit. For Obamacare to work politically, a lot of people are going to have to die.