It's always interesting to see how far partisans will go in throwing principle out the window if they think it helps their candidate.
Matthew Yglesias at Vox provides the latest case study.
He hits Bernie Sanders' single-payer health care plan with the same zombie lie that Republicans raised against the ACA:
Is abortion covered? Is acupuncture? What if there are shortages of medical equipment? What if a doctor wants to prescribe a course of treatment that's not supported by science.
Sanders has nothing to say about any of this. In the debate he thundered rhetorically: "Tell me why we are spending over three times more than the British who guarantee health care to all of their people?"
As it happens, there is an answer to this question: In the United Kingdom, the central government acts to comprehensively set wages and salaries for doctors and other health care providers. They set them at levels far lower than what we see in the United States. And a government board with the friendly acronym NICE serves as a centralized authority empowered to decide what treatments will and won't be paid for (death panels, in short).
In the UK, as in Canada, as in other public health insurance systems, costs have to be limited. Governments don't simply agree to pay whatever doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc. want to charge. They decide rationally which healthcare services should be considered medically necessary, and which should be considered optional, and how much is appropriate to pay providers for them.
The medically necessary services are covered by the public insurance system; the optional ones can be covered by added-on private plans or paid for out of pocket.
The boards that make this determination every couple of years, and adjust it with the country's changing healthcare needs, are composed of doctors, hospital administrators, and government healthcare wonks.
The fact that such a rational way of going about things could be branded death panels, by someone on the Dem side of the equation, shows how shockingly low some partisans will go.