The reports that the health care reform plans moving through Congress contained a so-called “death panel,” which would have encouraged or allowed euthanasia, are complete falsehoods. Unfortunately, although the rumors deserve a swift death, there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism in the current health care debate to kill them. What was contained in the bills, until the hysteria over it forced its removal, was payment for end of life discussions with doctors, a perfectly reasonable and rational approach to dealing with the issues of terminal illness

I experienced how valuable such conversations were three years ago when my 94-year-old father was dying. He grew increasingly tired of being rushed to the hospital emergency room for flare-ups of various problems his failing body was experiencing, and finally said he was done. We consulted with his primary doctor and ultimately called Denver Hospice. They took over his care at home, and he never went to the hospital again, dying peacefully in his own bed six months later. These were the gentlest, most caring people you can imagine, in stark contrast with the emergency rooms docs whose instinct was to try and cure him by poking, prodding, injecting and generally making him miserable. The whole process was a huge relief to all concerned, and saved an enormous number of unnecessary medical interventions, and the costs that go with them. That purely voluntary consultation is what the screamers are calling a death panel.

There is another aspect of the bills that some of the death panel conspiracy theorists are pointing to, and that is the independent panel whose job it will be to determine what the public option should pay for. People, this is no different than what already exists. Nobody pays for everything. Medicare decides what it will pay for and what it won’t. So do insurance companies. State insurance commissions set minimum standards for policies. How else are you going to construct a rational system? But, in the hysterical debate over reform, this sensible practice somehow becomes the government killing grandma.

Here’s the irony in all of this. If we don’t reform the way we pay for health care, the only way Medicare will survive is by drastically cutting benefits to the elderly. Then we will have rationing, and we really will end up pulling the plug on grandma. And we won’t even need a death panel to do it.