Help Wanted: Immediate Opening For Fact-Checkers At IBD & Human Events.

Right-wing evidence of an Obama plan to off seniors via an imaginary, diabolical health care reform mechanism is as thin as Sarah Palin's skin. And sometimes the anti-reform crowd just plain steps in shit.

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution spotted the telltale footprints of fools all over the ultra-conservative magazine Human Events, who itself failed to fact-check a typically hysterical editorial by Investors Business Daily. Human Events claimed that IBD "just exposed the Achilles heel of Obamacare, that hostile, socialist government takeover of your hospital, doctors, children, and grandparents."

Just what "hostile, socialist" peril did IBD find?

This administration, pledging to cut medical costs and for which "cost-effectiveness" is a new mantra, knows that a quarter of Medicare spending is made in a patient's final year of life. Certainly the British were aware when they nationalized their medical system.

The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror movie script.

The U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the "quality adjusted life year."

One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on.

The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

As Bookman pointed out, "Of course, that same Stephen Hawking who wouldn’t have a chance in the United Kingdom was in fact born in the United Kingdom, has lived his entire life in the United Kingdom and lives there still today, at the ripe old age of 67. (He was in fact hospitalized earlier this month.) Hawking is, you might say, living, breathing proof that these people are first-class fools."

(Efforts to reach Sarah Palin were unsuccessful. JackRabbit Café is unable to confirm reports that the former Alaska governor was last seen frantically leafing through her daughter's geography books, trying to find the United Kingdom and wondering why she couldn't see it from her house.)