death panel
death panel noun: a fictitious government committee which is responsible for choosing which of various patients will receive healthcare, and which withholds life-saving treatment from some in order to reduce costs.
Noun
death panel (plural death panels)
- A fictitious government committee which is responsible for choosing which of various patients will receive healthcare, and which withholds life-saving treatment from some in order to reduce costs.
Forms of death panel
| plural | death panels |
|---|
Origin of death panel
First used in a 2009 Facebook note by U.S. politician Sarah Palin: "... my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."
Questions about death panel
- What does death panel mean?
- Death panel means a fictitious government committee which is responsible for choosing which of various patients will receive healthcare, and which withholds life-saving treatment from some in order to reduce costs.
- What part of speech is death panel?
- Death panel is a noun.
- What is the plural of death panel?
- The plural of death panel is death panels.
Words near death panel in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: death panel (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-death panel.wav.
Cite this entry: “death panel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/death_panel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.