Conversation on a Death Panel
Blog, Humor, Politics: September 2nd, 2009Far away, in the dank recesses of some bureaucratic office building, a guild of government officials gathers, all of them hooded and somber, their eyes glaring with the sheen of the unyielding power that has recently been granted to them by the health care reform bill. They sit around a long, oval shaped table, distributing thick folders prominently labeled “Grannies” with a red slash through the word.
Panelist 1: I hereby convene this death panel!
Panelist 2: And yet you forego the traditional ceremonial practice of drinking a glass of blood to open the meeting!
Panelist 3: I think we all had enough blood to drink at lunch.
Panelist 1: You all know very well that, as a Catholic, I only drink blood on Sundays. But nevermind that. Let us forget the silly ceremony and directly address the “Granny” question.
Panelist 2: (Excitedly) I say we kill them all! Turn ‘em into firewood, my papa always said. There’s nothing quite like the smell of granny roasting on an open fire.
Panelist 3: I’m sorry, but we have to make at least a minimal effort to give health care to some of these grannies. Of course, there is a time and place for setting various grannies alight if that is financially prudent, but we can’t simply assume a pyre of all grannies will offer the most benefits and least costs. Gasoline, after all, is expensive, and grannies are slow to burn, unlike those soft, flammable Down Syndrome babies; they just light up like tiny little Roman candles!
Panelist 2: Look, the only reason I signed on for this death panel gig was to burn some grannies. If you want to provide health care to some of them, you go ahead and do that, but the health care bill was pretty explicit in endorsing universal mandatory granny burning. The Democrats are only considering dropping the public option provision, not the universal granny burning provision.
Panelist 1: Do the two of you never stop bickering? Let us please try to discuss the Granny issue rationally. This is America, after all, where things have always been discussed rationally and never exaggerated, overblown, or distorted by media outlets.
Panelist 2: (Incredulously) America?! Everyone knows we’re actually Nazi Germany now. The renaming was established on page 423 of the health care bill: “Verily, with the passing of this bill, thou shalt rename thy country ‘Nazi Germany’.” Plus it shouldn’t be a surprise that this country is no longer America, seeing as how we elected someone who was actually born in Kenya to the highest office. I can’t believe the conservatives didn’t uncover our Kenyan plant in the government sooner! In the next election we may even get our Nigerian puppet in office, after sending emails to all American voters about how they need to provide their bank account numbers, social security number, and vote Democrat if they wish to receive the $1,000,000 left for them in a Nigerian bank by their long-lost Nigerian relative.
Panelist 3: Obama from Kenya? Don’t be so foolish. That Kenyan birth certificate was a total fraud and a joke. Besides, everyone knows that Obama was actually born in hell, him being the antichrist and all. This is why we liberals loyally serve him, O Dark Master!
Panelist 2: Regardless, we still need to go through this list of grannies and assign them to various forms of death. Like the health care bill noted, this is the most effective way of reducing costs associated with health care.
Panelist 1: Now wait just a second. We can’t just kill these grannies in whatever way suits you. We have to kill only those grannies that are likely to incur the most health care costs, and kill them in a manner that is cheap and affordable. Contrary to prior belief, killing grannies is actually quite costly. Did you know that socialized medicine in other countries often spends as much as $12 for every granny killed? When you consider those costs with the fact that putting grannies in a hamster wheel to generate electricity can save $20 on a yearly electricity bill, you have to wonder if we should be so quick to kill all grannies.
Panelist 2: It’s true. Plus, in order to be euthanized, the grannies have to wait in endless, government-run lines, stretching for miles. In some cases these grannies may have to wait for months and years just to get their much-needed euthansia services from the government. This is what happens with government-run euthanasia. If only we could just hire someone from the private sector, like Blackwater, to ice those grannies. It worked for Bush in Iraq, after all! But that would not go over well with our liberal, health-care-waiting-list-loving constituents. Those crazy hippies just love waiting in lines!
Panelist 3: We may have to set up a private sector granny-euthanizing system, to help placate those rich, Republican grannies who want to be euthanized without government involvement by private entities. It’s a compromise to consider. Plus with a little granny euthanasia competition, perhaps the industry could be spurred to more and more efficient granny destruction.
Panelist 1: I’ll have to run that by the granny death squad czar.
Panelist 2: Okay, okay, but let’s just get on with it! (Reaches for a file from the large folder.) Here. This is Granny Mae’s medical file. (Pauses to think a bit.) I say we burn her!
Panelist 3: Shouldn’t we determine whether she weighs as much as a duck fir…
Panelist 1: No! We can’t burn Granny Mae. Are you ignoring the details of her file? She’s white! Everyone knows that the new liberal medical affirmative action program detailed on page 342 of the bill mandates that illegal immigrants and minorities get first dibs on our euthanasia services. No more will the white man be privileged!
Panelist 3: I think you mean the white man or woman. We have to be sure to be gender neutral when talking about our white privilege!
Panelist 1: This is true. As such, though, Grannie Mae must be placed last on the waiting list for euthanasia. Unfortunately we will have to ration our granny-killing squad, and only those most in need of a granny killing will receive it.
Panelist 2: Oh, I hope those conservatives don’t hear about this. Soon they’ll be bitching about rationed care, talking about the tragedy of the commons and what-not. When everyone has access to euthanasia, you don’t take care of it or take responsibility for it, they’ll say, and sooner or later the euthanasia will be so degraded and corrupted by misuse that it will amount to hitting old ladies with mittens and nerfballs or else trying to set them on fire withice water. If only economics didn’t constantly try to foil our death panel decisions!
Panelist 3: Wait. Do you… Do you smell that?
Panelist 2: It smells like burning. Mmm! The fresh smell of grannies!
Panelist 3: That’s not grannies. It appears that I’m the one on fire.
Panelist 2: Well, would you look at that! So am I!
Panelist 1: Okay, I might as well tell you guys. You are both too old. So I had to set you on fire. We decided this in the upper hierarchy of death panels that oversees this lower death panel.
Panelist 3: I’m just glad that my insurance costs for this procedure will be covered by the government health care plan! I’m not sure my family could afford the matches and combustibles that made this possible!
Panelist 1: (Dousing himself with gasoline.) Yes, our new health care plan is a great boon to everyone, in part because of our efforts on the death panel. Thankfully, I too was chosen to be euthanized. I myself was the deciding vote! To think they tried to deny my chance at euthanasia, and cost-saving, merely because I am 1/4th white. It’s almost reverse discrimination!
Panelist 2: Just think, under the old plan of private, employer-based insurance, we would have been denied coverage for this euthanasia! They would have killed us the old-fashioned way, by simply denying us any insurance for our pre-existing conditions and finding ways to weasel out of paying for important procedures or covering claims! A panel of insurance company claims adjusters would gather, not unlike we gather here, decide who gets coverage based on their health histories and physical examinations, and pore over claims to deny in an effort to preserve profit margins! Can you imagine such a world? A world where panels actually convene to kill grannies?
Panelist 1: I simply cannot imagine such a thing. Insurance companies denying coverage to the sick and the poor, charging unreasonable premiums that most can’t afford, and in effect sentencing these people to a slow, euthanized death? I can’t imagine what that could possibly be like!
Suddenly, there is silence. The death panelists are reduced to ash. A large group of identically dressed janitors enters, all of them wearing jumpsuits with sickle and hammer logos on the breast, and they slowly and incompetently attempt to sweep up the ashes, inefficiently and haphazardly moving about as they are shouted at by multitudes of bureaucrats with megaphones giving them conflicting directions, while those bureaucrats are shouted at by further bureaucrats with conflicting suggestions, and so on into infinity, until eventually, after years of random, erratic sweeping, the ashes have finally been swept up into a neat pile, and the next death panel enters, armed with a new stack of granny-euthanasia files, ready to fulfill their duty as death panelists to kill as many grannies as possible.
