Why are progressives willing to condemn the old and infirm to death

I see people aged 67 or 68 at class reunions who dodder around and are constantly going to the doctor.... Why should I have to pay for people who just eat and drink and make no effort? I walk every day and do other things, but I'm paying more in taxes.

In the U.S., former labor secretary Robert Reich offered an audience of cheering young people the following example of what an "honest" presidential candidate would say about health care:

We're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive... so we're going to let you die.

And of course the more prominent apostles of the death cult's moral code are merely reflecting the white papers and scholarly assessments of the "experts," as exemplified by Michael Lind's eminently "moderate" critique of the issue of health care rationing at Salon, back in October 2012. The talk among some Obama administration officials, such as "car czar" Steven Rattner in a New York Times op-ed, about the need to ration care for the weak and old, is insufficient, argues Lind. (Both Rattner and Lind are members of the leftist New America Foundation.) Rather, Lind suggests that while rationing "may be defended in some cases" -- Rattner's op-ed begins, "We need death panels" -- the most comprehensive solution is for government to set and control all prices for healthcare throughout the public and private spheres, as has been "tried and tested" in "all other advanced countries."

Thus, rationing care is just one very sensible part of a multifaceted solution; the value of denying basic property rights and voluntarism, however, must not be neglected. See how reasonable all of this can be made to sound, if only one ignores the logical perversity at the center of it?

As that perversity is so pervasive in today's public discourse on healthcare, perhaps it has become somewhat obscure. Let us state it clearly: the advocates of government-controlled healthcare wish to create a legal monopoly on the provision of treatment to the sick, and then to deny treatment to some on the grounds that "we" cannot afford to offer treatment to everyone.

When Robert Reich says "we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life," he is beginning from the assumption that "we" -- i.e., the government -- are the only possible or legitimate source of "that technology and those drugs."