[LoveTTatall]

Yes, Gov. Brewer, Arizona does have a death panel

Gov. Grim Reaper and the fallen angels of the Republican-controlled Legislature do not like being called a death panel.

But that is what they are.

If elected officials make budget decisions that determine whether sick people live or die - and they choose the latter - they are a death panel.

If, in turn, Gov. Jan Brewer (with the blessing of those same dark angels) chooses to take an expensive trip to Washington to attend a Supreme Court hearing at which she cannot speak and during which the state's lawyers defend an employer-sanctions law that has been completely ineffective - and she does this rather than call a special session to address the needs of seriously ill citizens - then, yes, death panel is the appropriate description.

It could be that legislators will change their minds and decide to renew funding for the life-saving transplant operations that had been eliminated for some AHCCCS patients.

Some seem to be leaning that way.

But the governor says that she first wants them to come up with a solution to the state's $1 billion budget deficit.

It's a cruel political card to play.

The budgetary savings projected from allowing gravely ill working people to die for lack of transplants has been described as somewhere between $1.4 million and $5 million for a year.

Arizona's budget is about $8.5 billion.

Does anyone doubt that a determined budget cutter could find other ways to trim those billions without condemning sick people to death?

Particularly since even some of those who supported the cuts now admit that they may have based their decisions on statistics about survival rates that weren't exactly accurate.

This is an easy call, though it illustrates a joke sent to me recently by a man who has worked for a long time at the state Capitol. It goes:

Question: How is Arizona like Oz?

Answer: It's the story of a naive female traveler being led through dangerous territory by people with no brains, no heart and no courage.

In the past couple of days I've written online for azcentral.com about the death panel.

I've heard back from a number of people who support the governor's position. Readers such as "ms15," who quotes one of the Founding Fathers, James Madison, as saying, "Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."

Others, such as "vrevering," take a more humane approach, asking, "To all those that think this is OK, if your granddaughter were on Medicaid and needed a heart transplant, you'd be OK with letting her die? Compassion, people. Put yourself in these people's shoes and see if you think it's still the right thing to do."

Still others, Such as the reader "Genio," want only to know, "Will Obamacare cover Montini's brain transplant?"

I've also heard from people who claim that covering transplants for those who cannot afford the surgeries would be "un-American."

To them I might suggest something sent in by reader "bobunf." It is an excerpt from "The Great Law; Or, The Body of Laws of the Province of Pennsylvania" passed by William Penn and an assembly of our earliest settlers in December 1682. There are 69 sections to the Great Law. One of them reads:

"That if any person shall fall into Decay and poverty, and not be able to maintain themselves and children, with their honest Endeavors, or shall die and leave poor orphans, That upon complaint to the next Justices of the Peace of the same County, the said Justices, finding the complaint to be true, shall make provision for them that then care shall be taken for their comfortable subsistence."

You can't get more American than that.