Huntsman Flirted With 'Death Panels' As Governor

The Huffington Post reports:

Two years before Sarah Palin conjured “death panels" from her active imagination, Utah’s business elite devised its own far less infamous version. And depending on who you ask in Utah, then-Governor -- and current GOP presidential hopeful -- Jon Huntsman Jr. was all for it.

In 2007, the United Way of Salt Lake City, in an effort to come up with its own solution on health care reform, assembled a gold-plated committee of civic poo-bahs: white-collar elites from the city’s Chamber of Commerce and banking industries, a conservative bunch in an ultra-conservative state. The committee met regularly in an effort to craft a reform plan that they could support.

The committee took advantage of a time when everyone in Utah seemed interested in addressing this problem. “I loved the consensus that was formed there,” recalled Judi Hilman, executive director of the non-partisan Utah Health Policy Project. “I’ve never been more hopeful for Utah health reform than at that time. All the levers that you need to pull were pulled in that proposal.”

So what did the bigwigs come up with? Along with a mandate, they produced a progressive cost control measure that would have actually addressed one of the biggest issues facing reform: the sky-rocketing expenses associated with health care. The plan called for the adoption of an independent commission, or “Health Benefits Commission,” which would essentially rule on which procedures were clinically appropriate and which were just fattening the wallets of surgeons, drug makers, and medical device manufacturers.