Sarah Palin targeted President Barack Obama's health care reform law on Monday ahead of the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling on the measure.
"As we wait for the impending Supreme Court decision on Obamacare, I reiterate what I wrote in my first post on this topic nearly three years ago," wrote Palin in a Facebook post titled 'Death Panel' Three Years Later." "I stand by everything I wrote in that warning to my fellow Americans because what was true then is true now, and it will remain true as we hear what the Supreme Court has to say."
The former Alaska governor continued, "It was a pretty long post, but a lot of people seem to have only read two words of it: 'death panel.' Though I was called a liar for calling it like it is, many of these accusers finally saw that Obamacare did in fact create a panel of faceless bureaucrats who have the power to make life and death decisions about health care funding. It’s called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), and its purpose all along has been to 'keep costs down' by actually denying care via price controls and typically inefficient bureaucracy. This subjective rationing of care is what I was writing about in that first post."
In 2009, Palin sparked controversy when she warned that "death panels" would result from health care reform. The claim was widely debunked.
Earlier this year, HuffPost's Jason Linkins reported on the origins of the unfounded criticism.
The Los Angeles Times points out:
Palin's rationale for claiming that the healthcare law will create "death panels" seems to have shifted over time.
Originally, she coined the term based on a component of the healthcare reform bill that would have allowed Medicare to cover end-of-life counseling by physicians, though that regulation was abandoned by the Obama administration in January 2011.
"If the Supreme Court doesn’t strike down Obamacare entirely, then Congress must act to repeal IPAB and Obamacare before it is indeed “too late,'" Palin wrote on Facebook. "All of Obamacare must go one way or another."
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling on the president's health care law on Thursday.
