> Sarah Palin coined the phrase "death panel" in a widely shared Facebook post.
Does not support the claim
> we let insurance companies label government triage as "death panels"
Does not support the claim
> we let insurance companies label government triage as "death panels"
The simpler explanation is that political Party A proposed legislation, and political Party B attacks it because a win for Party A is a loss for Party B.
And digging into just slightly further makes the claim make even less sense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel
> Palin's spokesperson pointed to Section 1233 of bill HR 3200 which would have paid physicians for providing voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about living wills, advance directives, and end-of-life care options. Palin's claim was reported as false and criticized by the press, fact-checkers, academics, physicians, Democrats, and some Republicans.
Why would managed care organizations (aka health insurance companies) oppose the government paying for more healthcare services?
MCOs earn 2% to 3% of the premiums that flow through them. The higher the healthcare spend, the higher the premiums, the higher the profit for MCOs.
Insurance companies spent billions of dollars on advertisements against the ACA. This is public record. They did it because they opposed all of the good things the act required - such as prohibiting discrimination base on pre-existing conditions or demographics (other than age), requiring many basic procedures to be covered, bans on lifetime/annual coverage maximums, bans on dropping policy holders when they get sick, prohibiting copays on various services such as vaccines, requiring that insurers spend at least 80% of their premiums on health costs, a wide array of reforms to constrain costs, and so on.
No one is ranting, but there does seem to be a lot of “I feel like this could have happened, so I am going to choose to believe this happened because it confirms my priors”.
>we let insurance companies label government triage as "death panels"
Who said the term first doesn't matter. Who popularized it does. Insurance lobbyists and the conservative politicians they funded did.
In the US, all political speech is bought and sold on the open market. Especially statements made by (most) politicians.