We were told that if America passed Obamacare, it would result in death panels.

This lie was invented by Sarah Palin in 2009, during the fight for what would become the Affordable Care Act. It was the hysterical version of the common conservative critique that universal health care means government rationing.

“Virtually every European government with ‘universal’ health care restricts access in one way or another to control costs, and it isn’t pretty,” said a Wall Street Journal editorial about the A.C.A. The Journal allowed that our system already rations health care according to people’s ability to pay for it, but argued that that’s how freedom works: “This is true of every good or service in a free economy and a world of finite resources but infinite wants.”

This argument was always specious, but it looks especially absurd in light of the coronavirus tearing through the world. America’s inadequate health care system, far from increasing liberty, is poised to make death panels more likely.

As waves of sick people crash onto undersupplied hospitals, doctors are preparing to make choices about who will get access to ventilators and other equipment, and who will get only palliative care. “Health workers are urging efforts to suppress the outbreak and expand medical capacity so that rationing will be unnecessary,” reported The Times. “But if forced, they ask, how do they make the least terrible decision?”