Heeding the concerns of Congress and the real estate industry, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department on Monday extended for three months an emergency program designed to unfreeze the market for mortgages and other consumer and business loans.

The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, uses Treasury seed money to leverage $1 trillion for the purchase of securities backed by a variety of consumer loans from banks that were impaired by contagion from the mortgage crisis. The expectation is that the purchases will cleanse balance sheets and free the lenders to make new loans. Monday's action extends the program to June 30 for newly issued mortgage-based securities, instead of year's end. The program previously was extended to March 31 for non real estate-backed securities.

Commercial real estate interests implored the Obama administration and the Fed to extend the program, saying it was taking longer than expected to get going because of the time involved in packaging loans into mortgage-backed securities. The concerned were echoed by 41 members of Congress, including House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., who sent Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner a July 31 letter asking for a one-year extension, through December 2010.

Charges that President Obama and House Democrats want to authorize "death panels" in their health care overhaul evoke a debate 19 years ago in which lawmakers first took up sensitive right-to-die issues.

The catalyst then was a controversial Supreme Court case, Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, in which a 5-4 ruling upheld a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that it was acceptable to require "clear and convincing evidence" that a young woman in a persistent vegetative state would not want to remain on life support for years. The court held "that the evidence adduced at trial did not amount to clear and convincing proof of Cruzan's desire to have hydration and nutrition withdrawn."

Then as now, lawmakers who wanted to make sure people knew about their rights to execute "living wills" or other advance directives clarifying their wishes in such a situation tried to insert language in a sweeping bill dealing with Medicare and Medicaid policy. And opponents quickly charged that the effort would inject government into sensitive personal care decisions.