Death Panels (or their precursors) are not far-fetched.

http://tinyurl.com/of6b56
The Death Book for Veterans Ex-soldiers don't need to be told they're a burden to society.By JIM TOWEY
... America's discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.
Last year, bureaucrats at the VA's National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, "Your Life, Your Choices." It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA's preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated "Your Life, Your Choices."... primary author of this workbook? Dr. Robert Pearlman, ...who in 1996 advocated for physician-assisted suicid...and is known for his support of health-care rationing... presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions,... a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be "not worth living."...a section which provocatively asks, "Have you ever heard anyone say, 'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?" There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as "I can no longer contribute to my family's well being," "I am a severe financial burden on my family" and that the vet's situation "causes severe emotional burden for my family."When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?...only one organization was listed in the new version as a resource on advance directives: the Hemlock Society (now euphemistically known as "Compassion and Choices").
This hurry-up-and-die message is clear and unconscionable. ...a July 2009 VA directive instructs its primary care physicians to raise advance care planning with all VA patients and to refer them to "Your Life, Your Choices."...If President Obama is sincere in stating that he is not trying to cut costs by pressuring the disabled to forgo critical care, one good way to show that commitment is to walk two blocks from the Oval Office and pull the plug on "Your Life, Your Choices." He should make sure in the future that VA decisions are guided by values that treat the lives of our veterans as gifts, not burdens.//
Secretary of Veterans' Affairs Duckworth appeared on Sunday talk shows and made a pitiful defense saying that they NOW recommend that the pamphlet (still on the VA website) not be referred to. Until attention was drawn to this blatant effort to convince veterans to "end it all", the VA was still recommending this. When asked why she doesn't just remove reference to "Your Life, Your Choices" from the website, the answer was that it had to stay until revised but that a disclaimer to say that it was under revision was sufficient. //
Sarah and the Death Panels by Patrick J. Buchanan
“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”Of Sarah Palin it may be said: The lady knows how to frame an issue. And while she has been fairly criticized for hyperbole about the end-of-life counselors in the House bill, she drew such attention to the provision that Democrats chose to dump it rather than debate it...we are undeniably headed for a medical system of rationed care that must inevitably deny care to some terminally ill and elderly, which will shorten their lives, perhaps by years.... Medicare is a system whereby 140 million working Americans pay 2.9 percent of all wages and salaries into a fund to pay for health care for 42 million mostly older Americans. And Medicare is already going bust.If Obamacare is passed, the cost of health care for today’s 47 million uninsured will also land on those 140 million. And if Obama puts 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens on a “path to citizenship,” as he promises, they, too, will have their health care provided by taxpayers....Now if a primary purpose of Obamacare is to “bend the curve” of soaring health care costs, and half of those costs are incurred in the last six months of life, and the number of seniors will grow by scores of millions, how do you cut costs without rationing care? And how do you ration care without denying millions of elderly and aged the prescriptions, procedures and operations they need to stay alive? ***Think how much you will save by killing people six months earlier than normally.****...Since he was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago, Sen. Kennedy has had excellent care, including surgery and chemotherapy, which have kept him alive and, until very recently, active...In the future, will a man of Kennedy’s age, with brain cancer but without the means of offsetting his own health care costs, be kept alive, operated on, given chemotherapy — by a government obsessed with cutting health care costs?...Will there not be voices softly suggesting a quiet and merciful end? In Oregon, the law permits doctors to assist in the suicide of terminal patients who wish to end their lives. Let us assume numerous patients have Alzheimer’s and, so, cannot be part of the decision to end their lives. Who then makes the decision to continue or end life? Would it be unfair to call the decision-makers in those cases a death panel? ...Rationed care is coming, and the death panels will not be far behind.// http://tinyurl.com/m75vfj