When I saw the headline “Kennedy Illness Symbol in Health Debate,” I thought: “Oh, here it comes. The Lion of the Senate tugs at the heartstrings one last time to pass his lifelong dream of nationalized health care.” But it’s really not about that at all. It’s about the rank hypocrisy of limiting care to the poor slobs who don’t live in the Kennedy compound. Jeanne Cummings explains:

The uncomfortable truth, according to health care experts, is that most concepts about lowering health care costs involve patients and care-givers becoming more disciplined about resisting the kinds of aggressive medical treatments Kennedy has pursued to battle his brain tumor.

By these lights, the problem is not that too few Americans have access to the kind of care that Kennedy is receiving. The problem is that too many Americans avail themselves of expensive treatments that may extend lives at the margins but have low prospects of actually saving them.

You have to love the terminology—”more disciplined about resisting the kinds of aggressive treatment” that the author of the lowest-common-denominator health-care regime wants for himself. And we get the finger-shaking from a “Harvard ethicist” (when those two words appear in tandem, be afraid, very afraid) who warns that we need to get about the business of “rethinking treatment” for the elderly because they suck up so much of our health-care costs. (Remember when liberals used to speak about the measure of a just society being how it cared for the very young and the very old?)

And what does the president have to say about all this? He, as Cummings points out, has “circled around” the issue of limiting care. And what about the notion that his grandmother might have to forgo a hip replacement? He says that would be “pretty upsetting.” (Well, at least he wouldn’t be “deeply disappointed,” as he is whenever a vile regime abuses its own people—or American citizens.)

So the bottom line in all this, as those who have weighed in on the “death panel discussion” have found, is that there is—I know, amazing isn’t it?—a widespread revulsion at turning upside down a health-care system that is the envy of the world, even with it flaws, and subjecting all but the mega-wealthy to a thicket of government oversight with the goal of increasing “discipline” (i.e., avoiding going the extra mile to save those in dire condition, or constructing atypical treatment regimes). Funny how it is that when presented with a terminal diagnosis (or when thinking they might be one day), ordinary Americans have the nerve to insist that they get better care than what a Harvard ethicist would dole out. And maybe as good as what a Kennedy would demand.