Aside from the Holocaust and its death camps, early on the Nazis waged a euthanasia campaign against the chronically sick and disabled. The program, called T-4 (Berlin Chancellory Tiergarten 4), assigned three physicians to the task of reviewing assembled health records from psychiatric and other clinics to determine who would be put away. The trio embodied a true death panel.

At first, the chosen ones were whisked away in the middle of the night by white-robed stormtroopers, so dressed to look like medical personnel. From there, they would be taken to remote locations and left to starve to death. Later on, their euthanizers turned to injections and finally–as a precursor to the Nazi death camps–to gassification.

This program, begun at the start of World War II in 1939, was aimed at Aryans, not Jews. That effort came later. The Nazis had a word for the individuals they considered non-productive. They called them “useless eaters.” In all, 200,000 useless eaters were euthanized (murdered would be more appropriate).

Now, this cheery bit of information is provided as background information to show what true death panels would do, which is completely unlike and far beyond end-of-life counselling as envisioned in HR 3200 (or at least one would hope).

If you want to know more about the extremes of where runaway health care “cost containment” can lead a nation, read Michael Berenbaum and his “Health care reforms are the antithesis of Nazi practice.”