It was almost 15 years ago that billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates decided to weigh up the cost of keeping “terminally ill” Americans alive.
In 2010 he suggested a “death panel” system be implemented in the US because palliative care wasn’t cost-effective
He claimed that the US was unwilling to question if spending money on people in “the last three months” of their lives was cost-effective. He further suggested there wasn’t a benefit in end-of-life care and a decision should be made to end people’s lives rather than providing costly palliative care.
He said: “That’s called the death panel”
Expose-News reports: Bill Gates was interviewed at an Aspen Ideas Festival in 2010 and said that the USA must get medical costs under control and re-examine its funding priorities to prevent its education system from further erosion. He said medical costs are dominating state and federal budgets in the form of Medicare and other payments, and fewer funds are available for education.
Gates told Aspen Institute President and CEO Walter Isaacson that the USA had demonstrated an unwillingness to question if “spending $1 million on the last three months” of a person’s life is a cost-effective direction, especially considering the same amount of money can keep 10 teachers employed.
He called for the nation to do a better job of examining the benefits of costly end-of-life medical care. “That’s called the death panel and you’re not supposed to have that discussion,” Gates said, taking a jab at critics of the health care bill that the US Congress had considered earlier that year.
The clip above is taken from a 60-minute interview held on 8 July 2010. You can watch the full 60-minute interview on The Aspen Institute’s YouTube channel HERE, the clip above begins at timestamp 31:22.
Where did the term “death panel” that Gates was taking a jab at come from? As Wikipedia notes:
“Death panel” is a political term that originated during the 2009 debate about federal healthcare legislation to cover the uninsured in the United States. Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate, coined the term when she charged that proposed legislation would create a “death panel” of bureaucrats who would carry out triage, i.e. decide whether Americans – such as her elderly parents, or children with Down syndrome – were “worthy of medical care.”
Palin’s spokesperson pointed to Section 1233 of bill HR 3200 which would have paid physicians for providing voluntary counselling to Medicare patients about living wills, advance directives and end-of-life care options.
Some prominent Republicans backed Palin’s statement. One poll showed that after it spread, about 85% of respondents were familiar with the charge and of those who were familiar with it, about 30% thought it was true. Owing to public concern, the provision to pay physicians for providing voluntary counselling was removed from the Senate bill and was not included in the law that was enacted, the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In a 2011 statement, the American Society of Clinical Oncology bemoaned the politicisation of the issue and said that the proposal should be revisited.Death Panel, Wikipedia via EncycloReader
HR 3200, also known as America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, did not become law. Instead, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, built upon some of the provisions in HR 3200 was signed into law on 23 March 2010.
By referring to “death panels,” Palin was referring to committees or panels that would decide whether to withhold life-sustaining medical treatment from patients based on cost or age considerations. Wikipedia, of course, negates Palin’s concerns as the “death panel myth” citing “fact-checkers.”
However, as American Thinker pointed out in a November 2010 article, they really did mean “death panel.” Highlighting two statements made by a New York Times columnist, American Thinker wrote:
They laughed when Sarah Palin said Obamacare would require death panels to control medical costs. But for some reason no one laughs when New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says the same thing … Yesterday he did it again both on This Week with Christiane Amanpour and then further explained in his New York Times column that no, he didn’t really mean death panels just because he called them … death panels.
… they really are death panels. Having government officials – panels, if you will – deciding the cost and medical effectiveness of treatment [versus] the value of a person’s life with the same compassion of Government Motors choosing to cease manufacturing Pontiacs and closing down dealers.
Death panels. Say it again, say it any which way but Sarah Palin nailed it the first time – a death panel by any other name is still a death panel.
Paul Krugman, if you want some highly paid government official deciding whether your life is worth sacrificing to control health care costs put that on your DNR (do not resuscitate) order not on mine.A ‘death panel’ by any other name (updated), American Thinker, 15 November 2010
People have been speaking about the use of DNR orders during the covid “pandemic,” particularly in patients with learning disabilities, elderly people and those with severe illness. Concerns raised and reported in corporate media include:
- Inappropriate application of DNR orders: There have been instances where DNR orders were made without the knowledge or consent of patients or their families, breaching human rights.
- Blanket policies: Some hospital departments implemented blanket DNR policies based on age, disability or medical condition, rather than individual patient circumstances.
- Higher prevalence of DNR orders in covid-19 patients: Studies have shown that DNR orders were applied more often to patients with covid, presumably “diagnosed” with PCR tests which were not fit for purpose.
- Disparities in DNR order use: Patients with learning disabilities, particularly younger adults, were disproportionately affected by DNR orders.
It is claimed that death panels do not exist. We beg to differ. Although doctors and nurses may not have been officially appointed to or taken instructions from a committee labelled as such, death panels existed during the covid era and perhaps continue to unofficially exist to this day. Whoever decided who should be placed on a DNR or given end-of-life drugs, such as midazolam, was and/or is the death panel.
Additionally, death panels exist in countries that have through legislation incorporated euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide or medically assisted suicide into their “healthcare” systems. Wherever euthanasia is being legalised so, by default, death panels are being created. In countries that have not passed statutes that permit doctors to kill their patients, death panels will continue to exist in one form or another if the misanthropic death cult has its way.
We are living through the process of the normalisation of “healthcare” systems being used to kill anyone who the state deems too costly to keep alive, is deemed a financial burden on the state or whose lives, according to the state’s criteria, are not worth living. This is eugenics. It is a form of eugenics that is easily implemented at scale where populations are dependent or reliant on socialised healthcare, such as in Canada and the UK.
Under the United Nations, socialised healthcare could be rolled out globally. Achieving Universal Healthcare (“UHC”) is one of the targets the nations of the world set when they adopted the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (“SDGs”) in 2015.
