Political Quotes

“They are going to use age as the means of trying to determine how to spend dollars. That means that one of my patients who is 75 that has diabetes versus another one of my patients that's 35 with diabetes, they are going to decide whether they are going to spend $100 on my 75-year-old diabetic patient or $100 on my 35-year-old diabetic patient. Dr. Roe was talking about seniors are very upset because we know where that decision is going to be, and that Federal bureaucrat who is not a doctor, that panel that is not going to be run by physicians, is going to be deciding the comparative effectiveness of spending dollars on an age-related basis with less dollars being divided by more people, which means rationing of care. And this panel is going to deny, deny, treatment to that 75-year-old. And the reason Governor Palin was talking about death panels is because they're going to just say, So sorry, you can't get that treatment because comparative effectiveness says spending $100 on you, a 75-year-old patient who has diabetes, is not as effective as spending $100 on a 35-year-old, and our senior citizens are going to be denied treatment. And what's going to happen? They're going to get gangrene in their legs, and they're going to die from that. They're going to get pneumonia, and they're going to die from that. This panel is not going to put them to death, but it's going to deny treatment, particularly the more expensive treatment.”