Cheryl Chumley writes at WTimes:

Once upon a time, Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and ex-vice presidential candidate, called out the government-run health care plan known as Obamacare for its death panels -- or, in bureaucratic lingo, its Independent Payment Advisory Board -- and for that, was soundly mocked and scorned by both members of the media and Democrats.

Now, one of the left's own darlings, the newly elected congresswoman from New York, socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is using Palin's line to describe private health care plans as a means of advancing her own policy pursuit of "Medicare for all," which is to say taxpayer-funded Medicare for each and every American.

"Talk about a twist on truth," Chumley counters and then cites the following Tweet from Ocasio-Cortez:

Actually, we have for-profit "death panels" now: they are companies + boards saying you're on your own bc they won't cover a critical procedure or medicine. Maybe if the GOP stopped hiding behind this "socialist" rock they love to throw, they'd actually engage on-issue for once.

"Here's how Jim Hanson, the president of the Security Studies Group, responded" to Ocasio-Cortez, Chumley notes:

Nice try.

But commercial insurance gives people choices about what coverages they want & decide to pay for.

Your single payer nightmare will replace that with a one size fits none "choice" decided by faceless bureaucrats.

Coverage for all. Treatment for few. [italics added]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez boasts a nice smile and happy face, as befits a saleswoman -- but what she is selling is socialist snake oil.

For a real-world understanding of the nightmare that happens to people when socialists like Ocasio-Cortez have their way -- when centralized government control supplants the diversity of human freedom and human choices -- consider this Oct. 23, 2018 report from the Miami Herald on "Blackouts Force Venezuelans to Live and Work -- Even Perform Surgery -- in Darkness."

Read more from the Chumley column here.