Alaska News

Palins enlist in national 'Defund Obamacare' movement

Alaska's most famous former governor and national political talking head, and the Last Frontier's only self-proclaimed pitbull with lipstick was back on the attack again Tuesday. Sarah Palin says she's joining the movement to take a bite out of Obamacare, and she's bringing former First Dude Todd with her.

"This beast must be stopped — by not funding it," she said in a communiqué launched by the Senate Conservatives Fund, a group that's part of a broader push for lawmakers to pledge against funding the health care reforms. "Today, Todd and I joined with many of our fellow citizens tho urge those in the U.S. Senate to not fund Obamacare."

Conservative Republicans contend the only way to stop the Affordable Care Act, which has experienced delays coming fully online, is to deny federal funding to the country's first shot at national health care. Palin has been a consistent, leading critic of the plan, and her most famous criticism, the assertion that the ACA would result in a bureaucratic "death panel" was named PolitiFact's "lie of the year" in 2009.

She posted to Facebook in August of that year:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin's most recent statement on the topic isn't as stark as that, but it does contain a hint of doom for the ill or infirmed. "Those in the Senate and those seeking to serve there must stand strong against this devastating program before it reveals its true face now recognized by both sides of the aisle as the bureaucratic and economic beast that will deny our families, our businesses, and our sick the ability to access health care," she says in the statement. "Join us in urging senators — Don't fund Obamacare! Just remember: if you fund it, you own it!"

Most of the Palins already have access to national health care, but it's not really American health care. It's part of a nation-to-nation agreement between the U.S. government and American Indian tribes. Because Todd is one-eighth Alaska Native, and his children one-sixteenth, they are eligible for Indian health benefits under federal law, according to the Anchorage Daily News. The Indian Health Service provides free benefits. Obamacare is significantly different in many ways, including the fact it would require people now without health care to enroll in an insurance plan.

Craig Medred

Craig Medred is a former writer for the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Dispatch and Alaska Dispatch News. He left the ADN in 2015.

ADVERTISEMENT