On today's edition of Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck, guest host Andrew Napolitano (Fox's senior judicial analyst) predictably advanced the falsehood that recently adopted federal regulations reinstated “death panels.” Napolitano told viewers that death panels had been in the original health care bill but were later removed by the House leadership. He then stated that death panels are back because of “the decision of a bureaucrat and a socialist one at that.” And he ended the show by warning that death panels will “tell grandma and grandpa, which will someday be all of us, how and when to die.”

There is no more truth to Napolitano's claim this year than there was in 2009 when he joined Sarah Palin and promoted the death panel myth.

In fact, the new regulations offer voluntary advance care counseling:

Voluntary advance care planning means, for purposes of this section, verbal or written information regarding the following areas:

(i) An individual's ability to prepare an advance directive in the case where an injury or illness causes the individual to be unable to make health care decisions.

(ii) Whether or not the physician is willing to follow the individual's wishes as expressed in an advance directive.

The Miami Herald puts the issue in words that perhaps Napolitano can better understand: “This does not mean ”pulling the plug on grandma."

One might suspect that Napolitano, a former state court judge, does actually understand that there are no death panels being created. But one shouldn't expect truth-telling from a 9/11 truther such as Napolitano.