You are on to something there. Obviously the euthanasia provision in the Obama plan is intended to help fund the plan, but that must therefore mean that only wealthy grandmothers will be euthanized. Why waste good gas on a poverty stricken grandmother? So, perhaps we need to reassess this and see if it is a good opportunity to distribute the wealth better - being good socialists we all, of course, think primarily about redistributing the wealth.

Is there really any room for reasonable debate here?

I like to hope there is, that a liberal can talk to a conservative friend and reason with him/her, but I've even heard some liberals I know parroting the same lies about health care the right is spewing.

If the crazies are controlling the debate with this hyperbolic paranoia, how can we even begin to have a serious conversation?

What do you want to bet that most of the people hyperventilating over this had no problem with legislation providing for freezing the bank accounts of people and entities with even a whiff of suspicion that money might have gone, however innocently, to an organization designated, even in retrospect, as a terrorist organization. Or for seizing the apartment or car of an old lady whose grandson might have borrowed the car or stayed with her overnight and was suspected of being involved with drugs.

I guess we shouldn't tell them that the IRS can already order money paid from your account if they have decided you owe them tax money...

The magnetic strip in today's money lets the feds scan your house and see how much you have, so don't store your money under the bed. The only safe place is under your tin foil hat.

I'm guessing part of this springs from the real fact that Social Security does have access to your bank account. My uncle was disabled (Cerebral Palsy) and got SSI from Social Security. Every three or four years, they'd mess something up, think he had died, and would reach in and pull back a prorated section of his benefits. Since he usually lived check to check, it would always result in overdrafts, etc.

Not that this has much to do with health care, but it is a bit scary when it happens. Definitely feels like a violation when money is taken out of your account without due process (or even any notice). Since the same thing happens with Social Security benefits when someone actually dies, this is something that a lot of people have experienced.

This is conservatism in the age of Limbaugh and Fox News ... Enjoy!

All crazies are welcomed to the MSM and are hyped up on too much Beck, Rush & Coulter.

This likely has nothing to do with healthcare consumers. EFTs already occur regularly between some of the large insurers/Medicare and largest providers (as no large provider wants to wait on the insurer to cut and mail a check when they can get automatic deposits). It appears this just adds onto the additional electronic transaction standards that are already permeating the financial side of the healthcare industry (HL7/EDI/UB/1500). This lie only confirms Shadegg's a knucklehead and has never actually talked with anyone on the billing/payment side of a provider/insurer.

The holy grail on the provider side is to boil the billing/payment cycle down to what us in the healthcare financial arena term "real-time adjudication" whereby for defined procedures/service, we can bill the insurer and receive claim adjudication as you check out from your visit so that we know both what the insurer has agreed to pay, and what the patient will owe, before you leave the provider's facilities. Expectations are this will start to be making an appearance in healthcare billing sometime between 2010-2012. My guess is most of the references to electronic payments/reconciliation in the bill refer to business between insurers/providers and not consumers as it's the insurer/provider that is currently filled with multitudes of red tape.

Have these people never met the IRS? The government already has this power. The IRS can (and quite frequently does) put direct liens on people's bank accounts and other assets. Even if the provision said what they claim it does it still would not in fact be an expansion of government power.