Sarah Palin Wins
Chris Kelly
www.huffingtonpost.com
August 14, 2009
The Senate Finance Committee has stripped a provision to reimburse Medicare doctors who provide end-of-life counseling to dying patients from its version of health care reform. Take that, Hitler. Hitler, like I have to tell you, supports Medicare reimbursement for end-of-life counseling because he wants the Federal government to talk America's old people into killing themselves. We don't know why he wants this. Maybe he's still bitter about the Battle of the Bulge.
And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for Sarah Palin's Facebook page.
Sarah Palin Facebook status was: "... is fearing Death Panels." (Thumbs down. Doesn't like this.) And that was good enough for Chuck Grassley.
As Grassley explains:
We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.
If you were really, really bone ignorant, for example, you could think they meant, "death panels." Fair enough. You don't want to confuse people into getting Hitlered. But was this idea that complicated? You get the very real impression that if our standard for legislation was "understandable to Palins" we'd have to retire the "Yield" sign.
Does Chuck Grassley mean we can only write laws that make sense to people who can't name a newspaper? ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/sarah-palin-wins_b_259395.html