Newt’s Personal Hypocrisy On ‘Death Panels’ | The New Republic

Great read from The New Republic:

Newt’s Personal Hypocrisy On ‘Death Panels’ | The New Republic:

If Newt Gingrich holds to form in Tuesday night's GOP presidential primary debate in Nevada, he may well decide to answer a question on health care policy by invoking the threat of "death panels." He backed up Sarah Palin when she first tossed that rhetorical grenade against the Democrats' universal health care legislation in the summer of 2009 and he wielded the dread phrase again at the last debate in criticizing the new recommendations against routine testing for prostate cancer in older men.

My colleague Jonathan Cohn did yeoman's work last week in rebutting Gingrich's specific attack on the prostate cancer issue. What has gone far too little noted these past two years, though, is just how deeply, personally hypocritical Gingrich is being in adopting Palin's "death panel" framing at all. Simply put, Gingrich really ought to know better, because his own personal experience is closely entwined with this issue in a way that brought him special insights that he has since cast aside for the sake of adopting a political cheap shot.

The "death panel" myth, as I reported in a September 2009 article, traces to a hospital in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a small city on the banks of the Mississippi. Since the mid-1980s, Gundersen Lutheran hospital has been building a reputation as a national leader in end of life care -- encouraging local residents to develop "advance care directives" that give the hospital clear instructions in how aggressive to be in treating various end of life conditions. Today, more than 90 percent of the hospital's patients complete advance care directives, many of them years before they become seriously ill. Not surprisingly, the hospital relies more heavily than others on palliative care and spends 30 percent less than the national average on end of life medical treatment.