Death Panels Are Not Needed When Hospitals DNR You At Will...

If medical personnel get away with this, then they are the death panels:

"Douglas DeGuerre was an 88-year old retired school custodian and a World War II veteran. He loved hockey, reading, and music. Unfortunately, he also suffered from medical problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, and congestive heart failure.

On September 17, 2008, DeGuerre required amputation of both his lower legs. Although he was seriously ill, he still wanted to live. He and his family repeatedly told his doctors that he wanted to be a “full code,” meaning that he wished to be resuscitated in case of cardiac arrest. This was duly recorded in his hospital chart.

Five days later, the medical staff changed his status from “full code” to “DNR” (“do not resuscitate”) without consulting him or his daughter Joy Wawrzyniak, who had medical power of attorney. When Wawrzyniak came to visit her father that day, she found him struggling to breathe. Wawrzyniak (a registered nurse) grabbed an oxygen bag and tried to help her father, while begging from assistance from the hospital staff. The medical staff stood back and did nothing. DeGuerre died of cardiac arrest. According to Wawrzyniak her father’s last words were, “I’m drowning, I’m drowning.”"

Despite being illegal, it is being done. Moreover, it is just moving the act from the insurer (government bureaucrats looking at charts) to hospital staff.

"As Goldenberger notes:

In Canada, with our single-payer health care system, Rasouli’s situation has a very public bottom line: Should taxpayers foot the bill for his family’s indefinite goodbye?… When taxpayers provide only a finite number of acute care beds in public hospitals, a patient whose life has all but ended, but whose family insists on keeping her on life support, is occupying precious space that might otherwise house a patient whose best years are still ahead.

(Goldenberger also notes that, “The board is instructed by law to focus on the patient’s best interests, not the health care system’s, or the government’s bottom line.”)

Although Goldenberger recognizes that his approach would make most Americans “apoplectic,” he raises an important — and legitimate — point. Any government-funded health care system must necessarily set limits on medical spending. No government can issue a blank check for unlimited medical care for everyone. The only issue is where and how it draws that line."
[Emphasis Added]

Death Panels Are Confirmed In Canada

Slate confirms:

"Last week Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that doctors could not unilaterally ignore a Toronto family’s decision to keep their near-dead husband and father on life support. In the same breath, however, the court also confirmed that, under the laws of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, a group of government-appointed adjudicators could yet overrule the family’s choice. That tribunal, not the family or the doctors, has the ultimate power to pull the plug.

In other words: Canada has death panels."

The article in Slate by Adam Goldberg concludes,

" Modern medicine increasingly allows us to extend life indefinitely, and so the question is no longer whether we can “play God,” but when, how, and who should do so. When humanity demands haste, and justice demands expert knowledge, Ontario’s death panels offer a solution—whatever Sarah Palin says.

Well, they already allow the killing of unborn, healthy humans who are in the way; why not dictate the deaths of those humans who are not healthy and are in the way.