Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, Politico's Evan Thomas brought up the term "death panels" as he advised that America will some day have to stop "spending so much money" on people who are near death. As he brought up a few examples of reforms for American health care, he ended up proposing:
(Video can be found here.)
And here's the big one: death panels. There is no way that we're ever going to solve this problem if we keep on spending so much money on the end of life. Europe doesn't do it. Other countries don't do it. We, as a society, sooner or later, I think we'll do it not through the government but through the marketplace, confront this issue of how much money are we going to spend on people as they get ready to die.
Referring back to Thomas earlier in the show discussing one of the liberal ads depicting Paul Ryan throwing an elderly woman over a cliff, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer joked, "You want to throw granny over a cliff?" and added, "You just want to pull the plug instead of throwing her over a cliff."
Thomas continued: "As my mother was dying, she said to me, 'Pull the plug,' and a lot, you know, which is an issue we're going to have to confront."
