This week, Arizona Department of Health Services Director Dr. Cara Christ announced that hospitals could begun applying "crisis care standards" to their patients, as the state experiences a massive surge in coronavirus cases that threatens to overwhelm medical care facilities. Those standards essentially dictate how hospitals should triage patients, based on factors like age, pre-existing conditions, and likelihood of recovery. They also protect hospitals from lawsuits stemming from this ranking system for patients. There's even a points system to help doctors keep track of which patients deserve which level of care.

Despite their genteel title, the standards are more or less the sort of nightmare scenario Palin and her ilk were screaming about in 2009. Only this time, they're being activated in no small part thanks to the feckless policies and general disregard for public safety that have permeated the GOP, from the Trump White House on down.

“Discrimination against people with disabilities, older people, and people of color were acceptable and widespread in the past, and such discrimination continues to happen today,” J.J. Rico, the CEO of Arizona Center for Disability Law, said in a press release responding to the newly enacted standards. “And just like with other civil rights laws, we need to be explicit in the crisis standards of care about protections to ensure discrimination does not happen here.”

In its crisis standards of care document, the Arizona Department of Health Services goes out of its way to assuage criticism that it could be applied unequally to different patients.