While appearing on Newsmax TV's "Steve Malzberg Show" on Monday, Time magazine’s senior political analyst Mark Halperin admitted that death panels are built into Obamacare and will be the mechanism used to control costs, Newsbusters reported Tuesday.
Halperin went so far as to say that rationing is "going to be a huge issue," telling Malzberg that it's "something else about which the President was not fully forthcoming and straightforward."
"Alright, so you believe that there will be rationing, aka death panels," Malzberg said.
"It's built into the plan. It's not like a guess or like a judgment. That's going to be part of how costs are controlled," Halperin said in response.
Halperin went on to say that he believes the country "can't afford to spend so much on end-of-life care," but those judgments need to be made by individuals andinsurance companies rather than the federal government.
He also argued that Obama and the Democrats have not been honest with the public about the issue and said more scrutiny should have been given by the media.
"There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny. It should start now . It should have started a while ago," he said, "but it needs to start now in a serious and substantive way with investigative reporting and explanatory journalism rather than waiting until the crisis is upon us because the law’s the law, and we’re going to have to have a discussion as a country about what kind of healthcare we can afford, particularly at the end of life when a lot of expensive medicine is often done that as a society we’ll have to decide – do we really want to spend that money?"
But as Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard observed, the conservative media has already been on the issue.Sarah Palin was shredded by liberals for suggesting that costs would be controlled by death panels, and, Sheppard added, Halperin's own publication said in September that Palin was wrong.
"It was the liberal media pushing back against this aspect of the bill just as they did everything within their power to misinform the public about everything in this awful legislation," Sheppard wrote.
Sheppard said that while it's nice to see Halperin come clean, he shouldn't blame conservatives for misleading the public about this aspect of Obamacare.
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