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On Monday Mark Halperin, Time magazine's senior political analyst and co-author of Double Down, sorta screwed up when he said that the Affordable Care Act's death panels were real, and part of the law. He was wrong. Halperin doubled down on Sarah Palin's geriatric dystopian nightmare during an interview with the conservative outlet Newsmax's Steve Malzberg. Here's a transcript via Poor Richard's News:
Malzberg: I think they focused on the death panels which will be coming, call them what you will. Rationing is part of it.
Halperin: I agree. Huge. It’s going to be a huge issue, and that’s something else about which the President was not fully forthcoming and straightforward.
Malzberg: Alright, so you believe that there will be rationing, AKA death panels.
Halperin: It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled.
That is wrong. Incorrect. Not accurate. False. It's literally the complete opposite of what is actually "built into the plan" in Section 3403, the Independent Medicare Advisory Board section (also known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which reads:
That's referring to the proposals to cut Medicare spending that the board will be charged with providing. We looked, and there's no death panel section.
This just goes to show that no matter how many times death panels have been debunked, no matter how long ago it won Politifact's Lie of the Year (2009), it's never a bad time to remind people that death panels don't exist.