The advance directive vs the prime directive

  It all sounds so simple. 
  Be sure you and your doctor have decided how to treat your illness before you get sick. Of course, you won't know what your options are because you aren't sick yet but that isn't a problem.
  The NY TImes article about the death panels is both orwellian and revealing; the Times reports it matter of factly, as if everyone knows that these decisions need to be made and that the government should be involved. Out of concern, you know.
  Ann Althouse picks apart the piece. Here's one comment:

The question is what do patients want and how what they want will be determined. It seems to me that the effort is to get people to commit in advance to death-hastening choices, by getting everyone to sign these documents. Now, all the new regulation seems to do is to authorize Medicare reimbursements for the time health care professionals spend counseling patients about the value and importance of signing the document. It's hard to see what's wrong with that. If treatments are covered but advice about forgoing treatment is not covered, then there's an incentive to do expensive things.

  As usual, the administration presents it very logically and clinically, in typical newspeak.
  On a related note, Gateway Pundit has a post about PBS's coverage of health care in Cuba. Jim at GP is horrified that PBS, which receives taxpayer dollars, would present such a one-sided, biased, totally inaccurate report. 
  Here is the video in which Gwen Ifill and Ray Suarez report, quite seriously, that health care in Cuba is so much better than in the US.

  What's remarkable about this video is the gushing of the propagandists, as if the average citizen in Cuba has a government doctor in every home. There's also mention that all doctors have only 1100 patients; no one is overworked, though not paid well, doctors see their work as a philosophical calling to aid in their social revolution.
  Jim at GP quotes from a recent article in the WSJ. Cubans are so angry over the degenerate nature of their lives that the country is ready for a new revolution: one that rids them of the ham handed fist of communism. 
  Medical care, unlike Michael Moore's portrayal in his fraudulent movie Sicko which was exposed by Wikileaks as banned as foolishness even in CUBA, is abominable. From the WSJ, via GP:

Dissent is spreading in Cuba like dengue fever because daily life is so onerous. One of the best documented sources on this subject is the Botín narrative (“Los Funerales de Castro,” 2009, available in Spanish only), which pulls back the curtain on “the Potemkin village” that foreigners see on official visits to Cuba. Behind the façade is desperate want. Food, water, transportation, access to health care, electricity, soap and toilet paper are all hard to come by. Even housing is in short supply, with multiple families wedged into single-family homes. The government tries to keep the lid on through repression. But in private there are no limits to the derision of the brothers Castro.

  Cuba doesn't work anymore, as GP points out. Communism has been exposed.
  American Thinker:

Furthermore, Castro's murder tally is not difficult to dig up. No need to consult the ravings of some "crackpot" scandal sheet from us "crackpot" Cuban-Americans. Simply open The Black Book of Communism, written by French scholars and published in English by Harvard University Press, neither an outpost of the vast right-wing conspiracy. Here you'll find a tally of 14,000 Castroite murders by firing squad. "The facts and figures are irrefutable. No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of Communism," wrote the New York Times (no less!) about The Black Book of Communism.

The Cuba Archive project, headed by scholars Maria Werlau and the late Armando Lago, estimates the death toll from Castro's regime, including firing squads, prison beatings and deaths at sea while attempting escape, at slightly over 100,000. This project has been lauded by everyone from the Miami Herald to the Boston Globe (again, no right-wing outposts) to the Wall Street Journal.

  Yet PBS continues to brag it up, as if this regime is exemplary of what the US should strive for. 

  Not to sound like Glenn Beck in this cheery Christmas, forgive the expression, season, but this all sounds like what is being planned for the US, step by step.
  Right on cue, PBS issues this extraordinary report on how great government health care is.
  Right on cue, the government took over education grants, with the proviso that the government will get to determine where you practice medicine when and if they grant you the loan. The government's intervention in where you practice medicine and how much you get paid are also mentioned, however minimally, in the PBS report  on Cuba.
  Right on cue, the New York Times is gradually revealing the truth about the so-called death panels. The surreptitiousness of putting the advance directive back into obamacare is a part of the email in which this bombshell is revealed. 
  The writer of the email urges people not to pass the email around, not to gloat over the return of the advance directive after having been rooted out to pass the bill. People might misunderstand, after all, that what the advance directive is really about is, well, what it's really all about: assisted suicide. Giving drugs instead of treatment. The government shedding the expensive clientele or at least drugging them into submission. (Have you ever seen the medicine cabinet of an elderly person? And that's current. What's coming may be reduced to one simple pacifying pill.)
  Is it any wonder Russian immigrants to the US are fleeing the democrat party for the GOP?
  And now, our PRIME DIRECTIVE.
  Abolish obamacare.