It's stated in a crude way that even the dumbest Senior can understand. It's the government determining when your life is not worth living and how mush money the government is willing to throw your way to keep you alive. With carefully created - SCARCE RESOURCES - which is what government care is all about, there needs to be a cutoff for people. Through government care, you will be just a budget item.
Technically liberals can argue that the public plan bill has no death panels in it, nor is it single payer. Now we can argue validly that the public plan, as proposed, will lead to single payer, and we know the democrat proponents for the public plan are for single payer.
Death panels is still a huge stretch, it's like when Michael Moores Sicko claims insurance companies kill people. Cutting Medicare should NOT be equated with killing people. This is dangerous short term strategy,