Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska slaps down Sarah Palin’s pathetic effort to discuss health care.
U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski on Tuesday told an Anchorage crowd that critics of health care reform, the summer’s hottest political topic, aren’t helping the debate by throwing out highly charged assertions not based in fact.
“It does us no good to incite fear in people by saying that there’s these end-of-life provisions, these death panels,” Murkowski, a Republican, said. “Quite honestly, I’m so offended at that terminology because it absolutely isn’t (in the bill). There is no reason to gin up fear in the American public by saying things that are not included in the bill.”
Sen. Murkowski serves on the HELP Committee, and while she didn’t ultimately vote for the bill that committee produced, she nonetheless had a big part in drafting it. I don’t blame her for being offended. It was actually her Republican colleague, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, who introduced the language that was misinterpreted as creating ‘Death Panels.’
There are only a handful of Republicans in the Senate who are still interested in policy. Ms. Murkowski is one of them. Good for her.
