Ezekiel Emanuel No 'Doctor Death'

Says under Dem plan he'd be told to 'take pain pills and die'

(NEWSER) - Passing health care reform in Ted Kennedy’s honor “not only defies good taste, it defies logic,” Mike Huckabee declared yesterday. Adding his own take on Sarah Palin's death panel meme, he said that under Democratic health care proposals, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” as soon as he was diagnosed with brain cancer. He called Kennedy a “shining example of why this particular bill is so bad.” More»

Health adviser blasts 'misreading' as 'an absolute outrage'

(NEWSER) - Sarah Palin's supporters wanted her to make some noise, and now it appears there's no stopping her. She used her Facebook page to criticize health care legislation again today, this time time going beyond death panels and singling out Rahm Emanuel's brother Zeke—a top White House health adviser—for a proposal that she says would limit care for low-income seniors, reports the Hill. More»

... they're being run by insurance companies

(NEWSER) - Sarah Palin thinks health care reform will bring with it “death panels,” collections of bureaucrats who will ration care, deciding whose life is and isn’t worth saving. The flaw in that logic? “That’s not the future of health care—it’s the present,” writes Mike Madden for Salon. According to the AMA, the country's biggest insurance companies denied 2% to 5% of claims last year, often with heartbreaking or outrageous results. More»

(NEWSER) - Conservatives are pulling no punches as they attack health care reform, but their scare tactics rely “on a notably elastic approach to the truth,” writes Mike Madden of Salon. Here are the top myths circulating:

• Obama wants to kill your grandma: The tiny kernel of truth here is that Democrats want Medicare to cover doctor-patient consultations about end of life care for seniors who want them—75% of seniors say they're important, but they're not currently covered.

Euthanasia with patients' consent permitted, court rules

(NEWSER) - A German court made a landmark ruling in favor of euthanasia today, overturning the conviction of a lawyer who’d advised a family to cut a comatose relation’s feeding tube. The patient, 71-year-old Erika Kuellmer, had made it clear she didn’t want to be kept alive if she ever fell into a persistent vegetative state, but her nursing home refused to let her die. More»