It doesn't seem to matter how many times this gets debunked, Fox and Palin are going to keep on flogging what Politifact gave their "Lie of the Year" award back in 2009, death panels in "Obamacare."
August 10, 2013

It doesn't seem to matter how many times this gets debunked, Fox and Palin are going to keep on flogging what Politifact gave their "Lie of the Year" award back in 2009, death panels in "Obamacare."

Palin appeared on Fox's Cashin' In this Saturday and she and host Eric Bolling were busy pushing the latest revision of this lie, which, unfortunately, The Hill gave credence to earlier this week. The two of them were happy to latch on to their "reporting" in the clip above.

Media Matters took apart The Hill for their shoddy article here: The Hill Rehabs Palin's "Death Panels":

There are no death panels. There never was a death panel. There never will be a death panel. The Affordable Care Act does not provide for state-assisted euthanasia, so there's absolutely no reason for a newspaper to casually refer to any part of it as a "death panel."

And yet, here's The Hill's "Healthwatch" blog doing just that in an article on the ACA's Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which is designed to reduce the growth rate of spending in Medicare, under the headline, "ObamaCare 'death panel' faces growing opposition from Dems": [...]

Sarah Palin was not right. Sarah Palin was never right. And The Hill certainly shouldn't be giving the impression that Palin's "death panel" nonsense has somehow been vindicated.

Palin's first deployment of "death panel" in August 2009 was in reference to the Advanced Care Planning provision of the House health care bill, and she said it would "decide" whether senior citizens and the disabled were "worthy of health care." This was a lie, and Palin got called out on it, earning herself Politifact's "Lie of the Year" award.

In December of 2009, Palin switched it up and tried claiming that IPAB (which originated in the Senate's health care bill) was what she was talking about all along and that "this type of rationing" was "precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor." This was also a lie; the law does not allow for the IPAB to make "any recommendation to ration health care... or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria."

Everything Sarah Palin has said about "death panels" and the health care law has been wrong. The whole "death panel" fiasco is a case study in how ignorant and inflammatory garbage can derail an important policy debate. And The Hill should know better than to treat it as anything but that.

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