Just don't call them 'death panels'... How about 'that-thing-that-comes-after-life-ends panels'?

This is an excerpt from one of President Obama's town halls last week about health care:

Sturm: But at 100 the doctor had said to her, I can’t do anything more unless you have a pacemaker. But the arrhythmia specialist said, no, it’s too old.Her doctor said, I’m going to make an appointment...and when the other specialist saw her, saw her joy of life and so on, he said, I’m going for it...

My question to you is, outside the medical criteria for prolonging life for somebody elderly, is there any consideration that can be given for a certain spirit, a certain joy of living, quality of life? Or is it just a medical cutoff at a certain age?

President Obama: We actually have some - some choices to make about how we want to deal with our own end-of-life care...I don’t think that we can make judgments based on peoples’ spirit. [my own emphasis added] That would be a pretty subjective decision to be making. I think we have to have rules that say that we are going to provide good, quality care for all people.

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The proponents of the President's plan were taken aback when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin decried the President's plan as including "death panels" that will decide what care elders receive at the end of life. They claimed that this was merely an insidious scare tactic and have launched a "get the real facts out" campaign to combat these claims.

There's only one problem: the President has advocated exactly the type of "death panel" that Gov. Palin warned us about, just under a different guise and different nomenclature. The unvarnished truth here is that no matter how much powdered sugar you bury a turd in, it still ain't gonna be a donut.

Obama says he wants to establish a panel to decide which treatments are most effective. That means taking the decision away from a doctor and patient and having a government panel make a decision for you. They'll make an arbitrary decision based on some accounting tables, not on your individual medical circumstances.

We don't spend health care dollars on healthy people. We spend them on people who fall ill. And something like 70% of medical spending in the US is in the last six months of a patient's life. So if a government panel of bureacrats starts making decisions on who deserves what medications and treatments based solely on accounting calculations and NOT ON MEDICAL EVIDENCE, then what else do you call this kind of legislation? Arbitrary-decide-what-medicine-you-get-at-the-end-of-your-life panels. A bit cantankerous of a title compared to 'death panels' but it's the same thing.