Perhaps it was satire.

But the right-leaning Washington Times (via Matthew Holt) sounds the alarm about the proposed National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, a post that has gained significant publicity since the economic stimulus bill was signed.

Bluntly put, yes, health care needs to be rationed in order to have any hope in controlling health care spending. Ideally, an entity free of political and industry influence can decide which services to cover, strictly based on the evidence.

It’s going to be a tough fight, as the Times observes, “a body free of political influence to make the hard choices regarding how these efficiencies will be realized – what care will be limited, and who will be denied what services. Naturally politicians would prefer to stay clear of these critical decisions, but do the American people really want questions this important to be free of oversight?”

They take it several steps further, drawing a parallel to another time where such decisions were “free of oversight,” namely, Nazi Germany, where “elderly people with incurable diseases, young children who were critically disabled, and others who were deemed non-productive, were euthanized.”

Extreme, to be sure, but a sign of how bitter the upcoming health reform fight is going to be.