Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was laughed off the stage for making what we now know is a prescient prediction four years ago. Perhaps she is one of the few who actually read the healthcare bill before it passed.
"And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course," she wrote on her Facebook page in 2009.
"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."
President Obama and his blind supporters who were busy not reading the bill howled in protest, calling Palin an irresponsible liar unworthy of the public political stage.
The media's alleged keeper of the truth PolitiFact declared the assertion the "Lie of the Year."
FactCheck.org, another alleged "truth" panel, summarily dismissed the claim as a "whopper."
Now comes Time Magazine's Mark Halperin:
The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for "death panels," which decide which critically ill patients
receive care and which don't, says Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.
"It's built into the plan. It's not like a guess or like a judgment. That's going to be part of how costs are controlled," Halperin told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"We do need to do some of that in this country, because we can't afford to spend so much on end-of-life care. A very high percentage of our healthcare spending is for a very small number of people at the last stages of their life," he said Monday.
"I'm not saying the system shouldn't allow that, but there's too much cost. There're judgments have to be made."
Halperin, coauthor of the bestselling book "Double Down: Game Change 2012," said the U.S. media was not effective in reporting about the effects of the Affordable Care Act on Americans.
"It's clear that at the time of the passage of the Affordable Care Act and in the context of the presidential campaign, the press did nothing like an adequate job in fly-specking and scrutinizing the whole law," Halperin said.
"Not just the provisions that have already become controversial, about which the president was misleading . . . but other aspects.
"I would hope that as we chronicle what's going on now with the political controversy of the law and scrutiny of the president's past statements on some issues that we all learn a lesson from that."
Can I get a show of hands of those of you who think Mr. Halperin's closing comments here are genuine? They're ringing hollow to me.
Mr. Halperin will soon be joining others in the media in attempting to resurrect the flailing President, a propping up they've been doing since Obama came on the national scene, a propping up that Halperin himself will now enjoy as those who were deafening in their critique of Sarah Palin when she mentioned death panels will raise nary a word now against him.
The answer to the question in the title of this post is not just no, but hell no.
You know it and I know it.
Carry on.
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