Vitality Mitigation Commissions: Don't Call Them Death Panels!

What to wear to your
Vitality Mitigation Commission
hearing.

The Republican National Committee announced that its plan for Medicare uses private-sector Vitality Mitigation Commissions to bring the freedom of the market to everyday medical decisions.

Unlike Death Panels, Vitality Mitigation Commissions (or VMCs) do not determine who lives and who dies. Instead, they merely determine who lives. Whether you die is your own choice.

"Some Americans without medical care will choose to die" said plan architect Paul Ryan. "Others will choose to live with crippling, incurable and/or preventable conditions. This Freedom To Choose is how our Plan saves money - money that for the most part would have been wasted of medicine and medical devices. Most of those medicines are made in foreign countries, so they don't create American jobs. We put the money we save into second vacation homes and corporate jets, which create many jobs for servants right here in America!"

Pundits cheered the introduction of VMCs. "For too long, America has been held captive to Government policies that sent many grandmothers to medical care which often meant they died long after God had called them, and sometimes in a hospice, hospital or assisted care facility," said a man in a suit on TV. "Privatized Vitality Mitigation Commissions, run by health insurance companies, will allow grandmothers to die at home or in the street, surrounded by the medical bills that will reassure their grandchildren that she could have received the technologically best medical care, if only she had not helped put them through college."

The Flaming Bag of Poo 2012 Campaign issued a press release endorsing VMCs. "Vitality Mitigation Commissions" would fit naturally into the Republican Platform," said a spokesman, "Right next to the Flaming Bag of Poo himself!"