Death Panels Dropped...For Now

Good news for everyone who is old or terminally ill:

If it had been Palin and the right tossing rhetorical grenades, they might have gone to the mat to keep it in there, but as the 'Cuda herself noted in her response to Obama last night, it ain't just conservatives who are freaked out by these provisions. Eugene Robinson and Charles Lane at WaPo also concluded that having "outside" input into end-of-life decisions when the government's desperate to cut costs could lead to abuse; Mickey Kaus and Camille Paglia have hammered The One about it too. And Obama's done himself no favors trying to explain what he has in mind...

Tired of the political migraines it's getting from this, the Finance Committee finally decides to, er, pull the plug:

"On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. "We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly."…

"The bill passed by the House committees is so poorly cobbled together that it will have all kinds of unintended consequences, including making taxpayers fund healthcare subsidies for illegal immigrants," Grassley said. The veteran Iowa lawmaker said the end-of-life provision in those bills would pay physicians to "advise patients about end-of-life care and rate physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care.

Now do you see how big the elderly vote is for Democrats?  As soon as the polls became obvious, they dropped it.  Hmmm...

Hot Air points out that the provision could be reintroduced in committee (which was my first thought), but explains that's unlikely because if it's such a drag on the overall bill now, why would they risk putting it back in at the 11th hour?  Makes sense, though I'd put my money on slipping it back in at the 11.9th hour in the form of some kind of a 3am amendment that no one will have a chance to read.  Call me a cynic if you want, but I wouldn't put anything past this Congress.

Of course, if Obamacare is passed and the government controls who gets what treatments anyway, this provision becomes essentially moot, doesn't it?

There's my two cents.