In a 1961 ad for the American Medical Association's fight against Medicare, Ronald Reagan spoke:

"Write those letters now; call your friends and them to write them. If you don't, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country...And if you don't do this and if I don't do it, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

Sarah Palin took the text of that very specific advertisement and misrepresented it in her stump speech to talk say that Reagan was talking about American freedom in general:

“It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.”

So is Palin saying that Medicare is a form of enslavement, communism or socialism? She then recently went on to invent some poppycock language about "death panels" concerning her parents or her child. How does her choices about her child's healthcare even enter into any discussion of health care reform? Medicare? Medicaid? Public financing?

It's impossible to have a legitimate discussion of how "public" these health insurance/health care proposals play out when one side simply invents language that twists and distorts before the discussion even begins.