There’s been a lot of noise lately about health care in this country, and frankly I’m getting a little sick from it. I thought about consulting my physician, but debate drain is not covered under my HMO. And yes, that is the quality of joke I think this whole debate deserves.

I am routinely mystified by the manipulation of language we see in public debate. No one considers themselves to be anti-choice or anti-life, but that’s exactly the dichotomy that the abortion debate sets up. In the health care debate we’re told you’re either pro-freedom or pro-socialism by one side, while the other crows that you are either pro-health or pro-death. I wonder if one can be a socialist and pro-death? Personally, I’d like to spread death around a bit when it comes my time. Maybe I’d get by with a simple maiming, instead.

One argument brought up again and again during this debate has been the so-called death panels. These supposed death panels would decide when the life of a person was no longer worth living (or cost prohibitive) and deny them government health care. I think the general idea is to scare the proletariat, but personally I find death panels to be a fantastic idea. Bring them on! I think death panels should operate like jury duty. In fact, when you are called you should get a choice between jury duty or death panel. I’d choose death panel.

Grim? Perhaps, but I think a death panel is a wonderful example of democracy in action. This guy has cancer? This woman has AIDS? This kid has a broken arm? I for one am tired of Congress imposing their morality upon me. I want eleven other random strangers in a room with me making up their own personal brand of morality. Willy over there hates people named Amber because some girl named Amber laughed at him for eating paste in the second grade. That’s a valid argument to lie on the table when deciding whether this 77-year-old widow from Nebraska deserves to live or die. Maybe granny should have thought wiser of continuing to use a paste-squealing name like Amber.

I suppose there’s some rational argument against a death panel system, but I’ll hear none of it. I’ll be too busy listening to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” trying to psych myself up for that afternoon’s death panel. Some little girl fell in a well, and though they saved her, she looks pretty bruised and scraped up to me. And her name’s Amber.