Need for health reform can't be lied away

We’re not sure which is the more discouraging thought: that some believe Congress has hidden “death panels” in a health reform bill – or that they know it hasn’t but are still insisting it has.

It’s definitely discouraging that Sarah Palin – who conceivably could have been vice president today but for last fall’s economic crisis – was speaking from either ignorance or dishonesty last week when she ignited the whole controversy.

This death panel business deserves to quickly fade from cable TV’s nightly shoutfests. Not only is there no such provision in the House legislation, as Palin and others have charged, but the Senate has jettisoned the language that’s been wildly misconstrued as an invitation to euthanize the elderly and disabled.

For the record, the idea was to encourage and fund end-of-life counseling for the terminally ill. Such consultations – which already happen all the time, everywhere – can help the dying and their families make deliberate decisions about palliative vs. aggressive care and other issues that arise when death approaches. Health care policy ought to be encouraging these decisions.

The death panel fabrication is merely the worst of the distortions – many originating with fire-breathing, Obama-loathing conservatives – that have plagued what ought to be a thoughtful, factual conversation about health insurance in America.

Others include claims – squishy at best – that reforms would require subsidies of elective abortions or sex-change operations, and that they would amount to socialized medicine.

There are nuggets of plausible potentiality in some of these assertions. A “public option” insurance plan, for example, might eventually socialize health care financing if it were subsidized by tax dollars and allowed to undercut competing private plans.

Proponents of the public option insist that it would be self-financed, not subsidized. But the fact that so many proponents would actually prefer an all-government single-payer system leaves room for honest suspicion. Still, denouncing moderate reformers as “socialists” is absurd and malicious.

The nastiest and most reckless attacks on the Democratic bills appear to be coming from conservatives who want Congress to do nothing at all. Many of them see the health care issue chiefly as an opportunity to embarrass and politically derail President Obama.

But the status quo can’t hold. Too many Americans are getting substandard treatment or no treatment as all – even as runaway medical costs are breaking Medicare, hurting employers and devouring an ever-larger share of the nation’s economy.

America can’t afford not to enact better health policies. And it can’t afford distortions that treat this massive national problem as cavalierly as Barack Obama’s birth certificate.