Is there a “death panel” loophole included in the senate healthcare reform bill?

  When Sarah Palin made her infamous “death panels” comment that has given her opponents ammunition to try to denigrate her, this is what she was referring to.

  There is a potential loophole in the healthcare reform bill that is being debated in the senate that would allow insurance companies to put limits on how much medical care is covered per year. This loophole was closed in the original version of the bill but has seemingly been removed from the current version of the bill. 

  This means that people who are suffering through diseases and inflictions that cost a lot of money– cancer for example– could see their insurance company cut of funding on a yearly basis once that person has reached a limit that is “not unreasonable.”

  The bill doesn’t define what that term means or put a value on what that term could mean. That will be left up to the insurance companies.

The primary purpose of insurance is to protect people against catastrophic loss,” Finan said. “If you put a limit on benefits, by definition it’s going to affect people who are dealing with catastrophic loss.” The cost of cancer treatment can exceed $100,000 a year

  This means that once a limit has been reacheed a patient will have to pay out of his or her own pocket or face the prospect of not getting the treatment that they need in order to live. When Sarah Palin made her “death panel” remark she was not referring to an actual panel, she was referring to this type of language that in effect would let insurance companies decide that a person’s life saving treatment might be too expensive, given a person’s health, to make it worth the cost of the treatment to save that person’s life.

  If that is not a version of a death panel, I don’t know what is.