Limbaugh, Palin Revive 'Death Panel' After 'Obamacare' Decision

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh wasted no time in his reaction to the Supreme Court's decision to deem President Obama's controversial healthcare bill constitutional. As a result of SCOTUS' 5-4 in favor of Obama care, Limbaugh referred to the Court as death panel yesterday afternoon on his nationally syndicated radio show.

Our freedom of choice just met its death panel: the Supreme Court of the United States, said Limbaugh. He also called Obama President Kardashian, a liar, and declared that 'Obama care' is nothing more than the largest tax increase in the history of the world...right in the middle of one of this country's worst recessions.

What has been upheld here is fraud, and the Internal Revenue Service has just become Barack Obama's domestic army, Limbaugh added. A full transcript of yesterday's comments can be found on RushLimbaugh.com under the heading Freedom of Choice Meets Its Death Panel.

By keying up on the death panel buzz words, Rush expanded on a theme Sarah Palin recycled earlier this week. On Monday, the failed vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska wrote a long Facebook post that referenced her famous use of the term when Obama first proposed the bill.

Death panel first made headlines when Palin used it in 2009 to describe how Obama care was Orwellian and could cost lives. She dismissed the proposed health care system as downright evil.

The America I Know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgement of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care, Palin wrote.

Earlier this week Palin implied she felt like a victim because of all the criticism she took after that statement three years ago. Politifacts deemed it 2009's Lie of the Year.

Limbaugh was one of the loudest voices that jumped to Palin's defense at the time.

It seems to me if you go to her Facebook, she's done some homework on this health care bill, he said. She's become an expert on Section 1233. Politico writes about she's doubling down. She's not backing down. She is doubling down, and this has got the White House in a defensive tizzy. But I would suggest that anybody who doubts her intellectual heft or her ability to learn and study, go to her Facebook page and look at the notes that she's taken.

It was a pretty long post, but a lot of people seem to have only read two words of it: 'death panel', she wrote on Monday. Though I was called a liar for calling it like it is, many of these accusers finally saw that 'Obama care' did in fact create a panel of faceless bureaucrats who have the power to make life and death decisions about health care funding.

She also said, I stand by everything I wrote in that warning to my fellow Americans...

The Fact Checker blog analyzed the rhetoric that has made such a frenzy and the amount of truth there is to it:

The political impact of her statement is hard to overstate. In 2011, the Obama administration even deleted all references to end-of-life planning in a new Medicare regulation when opponents interpreted the move as a back-door effort to allow such planning. So even in the regulations Palin achieved her goal.

Now, however, she claims that the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is what she was talking about in the first place. It is important to note that the IPAB is primarily charged with helping to reduce the rate of growth in Medicare spending - a goal that both parties say they want to achieve. The IPAB, made up of 15 experts subject to Senate confirmation, would also make broader recommendations about controlling health costs.

With all the controversy surrounding yesterday's decision and election season ramping up soon it's not hard to picture another death panel dispute again soon.