Your collectivist mindset, as indicated in your post, will be more of a foundation for death panels than the realists on this thread.
If everyone is on their own, buying private insurance, then there's no threat of death panels. Blue Cross / Blue Shield isn't going to come to your bedside with the needle just to get you off the rolls.
Once you put the government in charge ... well, governments that have power over everything have this amazingly reliable tendency to put troublesome people to death.
Obamacare is the path to death panels, but even more so when you sweeten the pot by adding entitlements on top of it. You're almost making it cost effective for the government to cap you.