In fact, what the House bill does is require Medicare to cover appointments for elderly people who want to talk about end-of-life care with their doctor. If you have terminal, untreatable cancer and your heart stops, do you want chest compressions, which will likely break your ribs and cause excruciating pain? If you have a massive stroke and fall into a coma, do you want to be fed through a tube? As things now stand, the elderly have to pay for such consultations out-of-pocket unless they are covered by some Medicare Advantage plans. The House provision does not "compel seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years," as former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey wrote in the New York Post. But the idea of requiring Medicare to pay for the counseling (saving Grandma money!) morphed into Palin's Facebook post that people "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgement of their 'level of productivity in society' whether they are worthy of health care."
The power of "death panels" as a phrase and a scare tactic also works because Americans are deeply uncomfortable with death. We don't like to think about it or talk about it, says bioethicist Tom Murray, president of the Hastings Center. Only 29 percent of us have a living will. As a result of that discomfort, reminding people of death sends them off the deep end, into the part of the neuronal pool where reason cowers behind existential terror. And we're particularly vulnerable to scaremongering in the atmosphere of dread created by the economic meltdown. When people are already scared about losing their jobs and their homes and paying for health care, it doesn't take a lot to make them afraid of one more thing. We're living with "free-floating anxiety" every day, says psychiatrist Louann Brizendine of the University of California, San Francisco. "The brain is signaling 'danger' right now. Whenever that happens, the brain typically loses its logical reasoning power." Fear is also the most contagious emotion. If Chuck Grassley is worried about death panels, millions of people reason (check that: feel), how can I be sure they're a myth?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/212131/page/1
