The media’s favorite economist Paul Krugman is under fire for these comments he made this past weekend on ABC regarding federal spending on health care.
“Some years down the pike, we’re going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes.”
Krugman is now trying to correct the record, or so he says:
I said something deliberately provocative on This Week, so I think I’d better clarify what I meant (which I did on the show, but it can’t hurt to say it again.)
So, what I said is that the eventual resolution of the deficit problem both will and should rely on “death panels and sales taxes”. What I meant is that
(a) health care costs will have to be controlled, which will surely require having Medicare and Medicaid decide what they’re willing to pay for — not really death panels, of course, but consideration of medical effectiveness and, at some point, how much we’re willing to spend for extreme care
This is merely a euphemistic way of saying the government must decide who lives and who dies.
Do we really want Medicare bureaucrats determining the “medical effectiveness” of any given treatment or medication?
Sounds like a very slippery slope.
