Palin posted her beliefs about the health care bill. The only one that's available is the House bill HR 3200, so that's what she must be referring to. Below is her text's assertions (minus the characterizations and other material that doesn't deal with facts) and the facts as best I can glean them from reading the bill.
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care...So far none of the proposals in Congress have been shown to offer any cost savings, the only assertions that have been made have been that the existing Medicare programs have reduced costs, which seems to be true (a 2008 Government Accountability Office study shows privately run Medicare Advantage plans have 16.7% admin. costs, while Medicare B has 6.6%; there are disagreements about the terms of the study, but no argument about its conclusion).
...but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.This seems to refer to this National Review article where Sowell says that "The government does not have some magic wand that can 'bring down the cost of health care'; it can buy a smaller quantity or lower quality of medical care, as other countries with government-run medical care do." This assertion may or may not be true, but is not supported with any facts by Palin or Sowell. The bill itself again does not attempt to lower health care costs, so it's impossible to conclude that what Sowell says would be its effect.
And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.Decisions about how health care is approved for payment or not is not provided for or mentioned in the bill. The existing Medicare payment decision process is referred to, but that would not be changed by the bill.
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 judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care.
Through researching other blogs and sites, it seems that this is referring to section 1233, "ADVANCE CARE PLANNING CONSULTATION" (it starts on page 425 of the bill). This section sets standards for providing information on what options people have to create legal instruments concerning life and death concerns in their health care, specifically a "living wiil," health care proxy, and other advance directives for individuals to express their decisions about their care if they are unable to themselves. The section establishes a panel of health care 'practitioners' to create a set of national standards for how information about these options is communicated.
The section only mentions providing anyone eligible for Social Security information on these legal instruments, and the panel mentioned has no power to make any decisions about any persons' health care, let alone end-of-life options. The phrase "level of productivity in society" does not appear anywhere in the bill. The section is designed, so far as I can tell, so that people can set down their preferences to choose how they will die themselves, rather than having others make those decisions.
Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens.Nothing in the bill would nationalize health care. It is possible that the 'public option,' a Medicare-like insurance available to anyone and government-run, could be more popular than private insurers and thus lead to that, but that thinking assumes that the 'public option' will be successful and people will freely choose it or people will be forced into it because private health insurance will not be able to compete. Either scenario assumes that the 'public option' will do a better job than private insurers in paying for health care, something that's hard to liken to nationalization.