I had the misfortune of being out in the cold yesterday to pick up a prescription at the pharmacy. It was for my mother in law and she has lived a vital life for nearly a century and with luck and care will out live us all. She is also a realist and knows fully that no one lives forever. During that drive I could get WOR in New York - a once great radio station that has been reduced to a talk radio format featuring the most breathless of hair brained scaremongers you can imagine.
One particularly noxious fellow, a Steve Mahlsberg or something like that, was doing his "Aha Obamacare has snuck in the death panels and is going to kill off senior citizens because it is too expensive to keep them alive". No kidding. He then went on to gloat about "being right about this" and Sarah Palin was right yada yada.
It isn't true of course. It isn't even remotely true. But as I inched down an icy road to the pharmacy to buy a prescription given by a doctor who charges something like $250 for an office visit (she knows that she will only get a fraction from the insurance company and can write off the rest), to pick up this $120/mo. set of pills I think that some wacko screaming about death panels is a small price to pay for reforming a health care system that is so broken and expensive that it is a wonder anyone makes it past 50.
One particularly noxious fellow, a Steve Mahlsberg or something like that, was doing his "Aha Obamacare has snuck in the death panels and is going to kill off senior citizens because it is too expensive to keep them alive". No kidding. He then went on to gloat about "being right about this" and Sarah Palin was right yada yada.
It isn't true of course. It isn't even remotely true. But as I inched down an icy road to the pharmacy to buy a prescription given by a doctor who charges something like $250 for an office visit (she knows that she will only get a fraction from the insurance company and can write off the rest), to pick up this $120/mo. set of pills I think that some wacko screaming about death panels is a small price to pay for reforming a health care system that is so broken and expensive that it is a wonder anyone makes it past 50.