The “Death Panels” get liberals hackles up more than the thought of “rationing” healthcare.

But let’s be real. Given limited resources and government funding, at some point your healthcare will be the subject of a cost/benefit analysis by a government bureaucrat.

Now here’s the funny thing: it is already happening.

We posted on this earlier, but the clip over 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

For those of you who have radio shows, etc. and want to run this, I’ve pared down this news story to a manageable 1 minute and 28 second segment.

You can easily catch what’s going on — a lady’s doctor recommends she get medical treatment. The state run healthcare system says no and refers her to an assisted suicide specialist. The bureaucrat in charge of what amounts to a real death panel admits that the money could be better spent elsewhere, so the patient is going to have to die.

It is an inevitable fact of life that the more the government outlays to keep you alive, the more your life becomes subject to a cost/benefit analysis.

Here’s the audio/video proving death panels are, in fact, real:

A reminder, from last year, of what state-run health care can turn into:

H/T

RS’ own Brian Faughnan has more on the Oregon case (”The compassion of the IRS and the efficiency of the Postal Service”); Nat Hentoff has more on the current debate.

If you haven’t, read Erick’s post about an Oregon public health plan (”public option”) administrator responding to a cancer patient’s request for subsidized chemotherapy with a denial of treatment but an offer to fund a physician-assisted suicide.

Now, know this: over the course of this decade, the state of Oregon has put in place a formal procedure for rationing care to patients whose health coverage is subsidized by government (i.e., who are enrolled in some form of the state’s “public option”). To date, they are the only government in the world to have formally done this, though many — from Britain to Canada to states here in the U.S. — work “cost-effectiveness” into their official denials of medical treatment.

After beginning the process of determining the cost-effectiveness (to the state) of hundreds of medical treatments and procedures in 2002, the Oregon Health Services Commission narrowed down the number they were willing to entertain offering coverage for to 680, ranked in order of state priority. This year — 2009 — the state will only reimburse physicians for performing procedures and offering treatments ranked in the top 503, in ascending order of priority.

Recipe for Denial of Care

WHAT THIS MEANS, of course, is that a patient enrolled in the “public option” who was in need of a treatment or procedure the commission decided to rank 503rd or below in priority would be ineligible for that procedure — period. Further, state bureaucrats balancing Oregon’s figurative checkbook could decide that the Beaver State only had enough health care dollars to fund some of the procedures on the list. This is where the prioritization comes in: under the state’s rationing procedure, a person in need of an emergency appendectomy (prioritized 84th by the the state of Oregon) would be denied that treatment before an individual in need of treatment for “tobacco dependence” (ranked 6th).

Does that sound a bit perverse to you? How about this: the state rationing board ranked abortion 41st overall in state-funding priority, meaning the bureaucrats who designed the priority structure in this “public option” program determined that the use of taxpayer funds for abortion is more important (and more medically necessary) than covering injuries to major blood vessels (ranked 86th), surgery to repair injured internal organs (88th), a “deep wound to the neck” or open fracture of the larynx or trachea (91st), or a ruptured aortic aneurysm (306th).

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