“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.”It also doesn’t and will never exist.These were the words of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on her Facebook page Aug. 7. A false information firestorm erupted since then, spreading now widely debunked myths and outright lies about health care reform.Had she merely said this at a town hall or a speaking event, her comments wouldn’t have gained so much traction.However, because of the widespread connectivity and popularity of the Internet   — specifically, social networking sites — any false rumor or uninformed grumbling can turn into a legitimate news story within minutes.Palin’s idea of the “death panel” came from Section 1233 of H.R. 3200, the health care bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, which would allow Medicare to pay doctors for providing end-of-life counseling to seniors, discussing sensitive matters like living wills and hospice care.Her original point was widely debunked and mocked.The most notable of her critics was Washington Post columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson, who blasted Palin in a July 7 Op-Ed.”You can say,” Robinson wrote, “that all of us who ever took Sarah Palin seriously — or pretended to take her seriously — should be deeply ashamed.”Robinson’s words were so hurtful to the governor, she expressed her disgust by cherry-picking a statement he made to make it look like he supported her views on death panels.In a follow-up post on Facebook, where her massive constituency can soak up her twisted perspective, Palin noted Robinson agreed with her on end-of-life care.”Even columnist Eugene Robinson, a self-described ‘true believer’ who ‘will almost certainly support’ ‘whatever reform package finally emerges,’ agrees that ‘If the government says it has to control health-care costs and then offers to pay doctors to give advice about hospice care, citizens are not delusional to conclude that the goal is to reduce end-of-life spending,'” Palin wrote Aug. 12.On this post, she provided links to her sources, including Robinson’s column, where — I kid you not — the very next sentence reads, “It’s irresponsible for politicians, such as Sarah Palin, to claim — outlandishly and falsely — that there’s going to be some kind of ‘death panel’ to decide when to pull the plug on Aunt Sylvia.”He then distinguishes the need to separate two debates we should be having — the moral imperative of providing affordable care to over 46 million Americans without health care, and the concern of reducing the amount of end-of-life counseling seniors would receive.The bottom line folks need to absorb about health care reform involves both the disinformation spread on the Internet and the utter failure of the status quo.Death panels largely spread from the irrational fear of rationed care which is what we have now, despite the best wishes of those wanting to “kill the bill.”More than 46 million Americans don’t have health insurance, most because of pre-existing conditions. For those that do, they live in fear of being dropped from their policy when they get sick for an unrelated condition.That’s rationed care.Only the super-wealthy are happy with their health insurance, providing them with the best quality of care in the world.Health insurance should have nothing to do with a person’s income. There shouldn’t be any talk about free-market solutions or competition between HMO’s earning billions off our illnesses.It should be a fundamental right for every citizen of “the greatest country on Earth,” as Palin considers us to be.Do you love America? Do you want us to be the greatest country on the planet?Then stop talking about how “great” we’ve been, and start imagining how great we could be.Eric Freeman Jr. is a 22-year-old political science senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter at TDR_efreeman.– – – -Contact Eric Freeman Jr. at [email protected]