Please, my liberal friends. I understand that you want to be generous people who assume that our opposition is capable of arguing in good faith, and Ross Douthat makes himself an appealing person to reach out to, because he will occasionally say not-crazy things. And you’ll be tempted to reprint them on the front page of Daily Kos. But do not be fooled! Douthat only says occasional not-crazy things in order to lull you into not realizing that he’s pushing a crazy point. That’s his schtick. He is not about being reasonable. He’s about taking crazy, right wing ideas and writing them in a way that makes them seem reasonable. And that’s what he’s doing with this Monday’s column, which can be summed up as, “Republicans are only lying about the existence of death panels, because of the death panels.” Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to say, “Hey, he admitted that the ‘death panels’ thing is a lie!”, when of course what he’s doing is basically saying that Democrats want to kill your grandmother.
Look! He says it right there.
In this future, somebody will need to stand for the principle that Medicare can’t pay every bill and bless every procedure. Somebody will need to defend the younger generation’s promise (and its pocketbooks). Somebody will need to say “no” to retirees.
In other words, amen to death panels! Which is another way of raising concerns about death panels, under the guise of supporting them. Hey, the motherfucker’s crafty, I’ll give you that. He’s luring Democratic supporters into admitting what isn’t true, which is that health care reform will shorten life spans. It won’t. It will lengthen them. If you’re an old person who is afraid of death, Douthat is basically telling you to be afraid, and he’s willing to posture as someone out to kill you to get that message across. In truth, reforms that would make it easier for families to look at the facts and choose hospice care would likely lengthen, not shorten life.
We performed retrospective statistical analysis on selected cohorts from large paid claim databases of Medicare beneficiaries for five types of cancer and congestive heart failure (CHF) patients. We analyzed the survival of 4493 patients from a sample of 5% of the entire Medicare beneficiary population for 1998–2002 associated with six narrowly defined indicative markers. For the six patient populations combined, the mean survival was 29 days longer for hospice patients than for nonhospice patients. The mean survival period was also significantly longer for the hospice patients with CHF, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and marginally significant for colon cancer (P=0.08). Mean survival was not significantly different (statistically) for hospice vs. nonhospice patients with breast or prostate cancer. Across groups studied, hospice enrollment is not significantly associated with shorter survival, but for certain terminally ill patients, hospice is associated with longer survival times.
Douthat’s posturing about he’s willing to kill you to save money is just that: in truth, money-saving non-invasive approaches may in fact keep you alive nearly a month longer on average, and in more comfort with more access to your family. But he’s interested in pushing the lie that reforms are aimed at killing old people off, even if that means having to adopt a posture that makes him look cold. The point is to adopt a cold persona in order to damn the Democrats with it. The ugly truth is that saving money and keeping terminally ill patients alive and comfortable are compatible goals.
In reality, the basic point of his essay is to lie to you about Republican lies. In Douthat’s world, elderly people who are freaking out and saying things like, “Obama is going to take away my Medicare” are making rational statements based on calm analysis from honest Republicans. Even though that’s impossible, because Medicare is a government program, and the elderly people freaking out clearly are confused about this fact, because Republican leadership is lying to them. They’re not reacting to sober assessment of actual policy proposals. They’re reacting to Sarah Palin telling them that they’re going to be euthanized. They’re reacting to email forwards, rumors spread by word of mouth, and direct mailers. They’ve convinced themselves that “big government” and Medicare are not only different things, but that the former takes away the latter. They’re almost all white, and they’re reacting to the race-baiting of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. They’ve decided that a bunch of younger, non-white people are basically out to kill them and steal their shit.