Ocasio-Cortez Is Wrong About ‘Death Panels’

Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will represent a New York district in Congress come January, has once again shown herself impervious to facts when it comes to single-payer health care.

On Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez engaged in a brief Twitter sparring match with Jim Hanson, the president of the Security Studies Group. The exchange began after Hanson commented that under government-managed health care, “Democrat Socialist overlords” would decide “who will live and who will die,” adding “#DeathPanels rock” at the end of his message.

Ocasio-Cortez, a vocal supporter of independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” proposal—a plan that would transform the current U.S. health care system into a single-payer model—responded to Hanson by alleging that “we have for-profit ‘death panels’ now: they are companies + boards saying you’re on your own bc they won’t cover a critical procedure or medicine.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that health insurance companies essentially act as “death panels” for choosing to cover certain treatments and not others is a highly erroneous, reckless comment.

For starters, health insurance companies are heavily regulated—some of the most heavily regulated companies in the country, in fact—and they are already forced under the Affordable Care Act to cover “essential health” treatments, including emergency services, hospitalization, and some nonemergent treatments, like substance abuse services.

States have numerous additional “essential health mandates.”

It’s simply not true that there are all sorts of serious health problems health insurers don’t cover, which is clearly what Ocasio-Cortez was suggesting in her Twitter post.

Second, the “death panels” she described aren’t death panels at all. Death panels are composed of government bureaucrats or policymakers who decide which health care treatments will be covered in a single-payer or government-run health care system.

The reason they have been labeled “death panels” is because under many single-payer proposals, the government is the only insurer, which means it has complete power to decide which services will be covered.

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