That was the Grand Canyon spread out behind Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, but the canyon he was mostly asked about on a Sunday morning talk show was that between the Democrats and Republicans on health care.
Interviewed on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” the Arizona Republican lamented the absence of the ailing Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, from the Congressional debate because he has “a unique way” of getting Senators “sitting down at the table and making the right concessions.” He said President Obama is as much to blame as Republicans for the paralysis on the issue because “the president has not come forward with a plan of his own.”
“One of the fundamentals for any agreement is for the president to abandon the public option,” he added, referring to the president’s preference for a government-ruin insurance plan to cover the nation’s 49 million uninsured.
One question he could not escape addressing was the conservative criticism that a public insurance plan would create “death panels” to make decisions about what treatments would be permitted for the elderly and terminally ill. He rejected the term “death panels” — deployed by his running mate, Sarah Palin — but he said language in some bills would have created boards to decide what procedures would be allowed for the terminally sick and dying.
“Doesn’t that open the door to the possibility of rationing?” he asked.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, explained why language about paying for end-of-life counseling had to be taken out of the health care bill the committee is reviewing.
“We were not going to have any of this end-of-life stuff because it scares people,” he said.
