GOP: Incentive to Kill

No Friend of the Elderly

Savannah, GA Health Rationing. Euthanasia. Death Panels. "Pull the plug on grandma." It's no wonder the Republicans get so frothy at the mouth over the current debate on Health care reform: they've already enacted into law motivation to kill seniors.

According to Newsweek writer Jacob Weisberg it's "been the Republican policy for years."

No less a Senator than Captain Chickensh*t himself, Charles Ernest ("Chuck") Grassley (R) of Iowa devised the death stimulus in the GOP 2001 tax cut. As Weisberg writes:

The estate-tax revision he championed will reduce the estate tax to zero next year. But when it expires at year's end, the tax will jump back up to its previous level of 55 percent. Grassley's exploding tax break has an entirely foreseeable, if unintended, consequence: it incentivizes ailing, elderly rich people to end their lives—paging Dr. Kevorkian—before midnight on Dec. 31, 2010. It also gives their children an incentive to sign DNR orders and switch off respirators in time for the deadline. This would be a great plot for a P. D. James novel if it weren't an actual piece of legislation.

With friends like these...