Jane St Clair
author of Walk Me to Midnight
You have cancer. Your doctor checks you over and says, "Well, you don't have long to live, and your insurance doesn't want to pay for expensive chemo drugs at $5000 a month."
Your doctor pulls out her prescription pad.
"We can offer you a quick and painless death through barbituates," she says, scribbling the prescription for barbs. "This will cost you less than a hundred bucks."
Don't believe it?
It's already happening.
Randy Stroup, of Dexter, Oregon, was 53 years old when he got prostrate cancer. He had no insurance so he applied for help for his medical treatment from Oregon's state health plan.
He got a letter this summer from Lane Individual Practice Association (LIPA), which administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County, Oregon. The letter said that Stroup's cancer was too advanced to warrant a pricey treatment.
However, the state was willing to pay for his assisted suicide.
"It dropped my chin to the floor," Stroup said. "How could they not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life?"
Barbara Wagner is another Oregonian who applied for state medical care because she had cancer. She too got a letter from the Oregon Health Plan, notifying her that "Treatment of advanced cancer that is meant to prolong life, or change the course of this disease, is not a covered benefit of the Oregon Health Plan."
However, the plan does pay for "comfort care," or "physician aid in dying," better known as assisted suicide.
Wagner got angry when she read that letter. She told a local newspaper, "To say to someone, we'll pay for you to die, but not pay for you to live, it's cruel. Who do they think they are?"
Dr. William Toffler, a professor of family medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, agrees with Randy Stroup and Barbara Wagner that the new policy of assisted suicide stinks.
"It's chilling when you think about it," he said. "It absolutely conveys to the patient that continued living isn't worthwhile."
But as Ursula, the sea witch, told the Little Mermaid, "Life is full of tough choices.
Dr. Walter Shaffer, a spokesperson for the Oregon Health Plan, said, "We can't cover everything for everyone. We try to come up with policies that provide the most good for the most people."
Okay, let's take another example of assisted suicide as medical treatment. This time, you don't have cancer, but you do need an experimental operation. Are you willing to sign a paper saying that if your surgeon screws it up, you'll accept an assisted suicide?
Last month, a woman in Cincinnati, Ohio, needed a face transplant, only the fifth one in human history. Her doctor would actually be grafting the face of a dead person on to hers.
However, the hospital was afraid that if the operation did not work, the woman would die a slow death. A bioethicist suggested that she sign a form agreeing to an assisted suicide - just in case.
"The biggest ethical problem is dealing with failure -- if your face rejects. It would be a living hell," said bioethicist Dr. Arthur Caplan. "If your face is falling off and you can't eat and you can't breathe and you're suffering in a terrible manner that can't be reversed, you need to put on the table assistance in dying."
People vote in favor of assisted suicide laws because they think they are giving themselves a new right - a right to a dignified death. They don't realize they are giving insurance companies and doctors new rights too. They think in terms of assisted suicide as something they can do at the very end of life to make their deaths more comfortable. They don't realize that they have created a new form of medical treatment. And yes, it's already here.
Sadly, I am in Washington state where this just became law. I live 30 minutes from Oregon (& use to live there) when it was voted into law a few years ago. This ballot initiative (for assisted suicide) passing didn't seem to create much of an uproar here. I guess most people up here seem to think it's OK for a terminally ill person to kill him/herself. Truly sad!! Compassion - what a lie.
Having gone through the experience of losing my father to brain cancer a few years ago, I have learned everyone should die with true dignity, love and care. Giving someone a lethal dose of pills to take - abandons them and shows them that we as a society really don't care about them, nor want to take care of them, nor value their life.
The Doctors are just taking precautions. Ethically, life is the main focus and on a higher priority than death by far. But when life is not an option, shouldn't a patient have a right and the comfort to know they have the choice to take their own life when life becomes unbearable? Outside of a hospital they would, so why couldn't they have that choice inside the hospital? It is ultimately the patients life, and it is their choice.
-Nat
The Doctors are just taking precautions. Ethically, life is the main focus and on a higher priority than death by far. But when life is not an option, shouldn't a patient have a right and the comfort to know they have the choice to take their own life when life becomes unbearable? Outside of a hospital they would, so why couldn't they have that choice inside the hospital? It is ultimately the patients life, and it is their choice.
-Nat
The Doctors are just taking precautions. Ethically, life is the main focus and on a higher priority than death by far. But when life is not an option, shouldn't a patient have a right and the comfort to know they have the choice to take their own life when life becomes unbearable? Outside of a hospital they would, so why couldn't they have that choice inside the hospital? It is ultimately the patients life, and it is their choice.
-Nat
I don't buy that lie. Giving a patient a lethal does of pill to takes shows them that we as a society do not value life or them, and we would rather have them dead than to take care of them. We are sending these messages: "We will pay for you to kill yourself.", "We will help you kill yourself", "You're going to die anyway - might as well give up now." -How is that showing compassion?
If someone takes their own life outside of a hospital (due to depression or something else) - we try to get them help - we don't hand out lethal doses of medication to depressed people and encourage them take their life since ultimately it is their choice. Why should we as a society do different for those who are terminally ill. Some people have defied medical science and lived longer and have been cured when it wasn't thought possible. How can you as a human make a judgment when you don't know what will ultimately happen? When my father had terminal cancer, doctors said he could live 6 months, 1 year, or even possible 8 years as they had a patient with the same diagnosis that had made it to 8 years. They weren't sure. A doctor's job is to heal a person, not harm him. This lethal dose assisted suicide law makes doctors murderers, not healers. It violates the Hippocratic oath they take to do no harm. It is not the doctor's job to decide when a person should die nor to help a person kill himself.
People are being pushed into killing themselves.
The U. of S.Florida studied Jack Kevorkian's victims and found that 75% of them were NOT terminally ill.
One man tried to change his mind during Kevorkian's visit, but family that was with him told him to go through with it. This was according to Kevorkian himself in documentation that he tried to hide.
Another woman had an interview taped by him. He had to repeatedly provoke her into saying she wanted to kill herself. She was relatively calm until he asked her what her family wanted. Then she cried uncontrollably when she admitted that they wanted her to die.
Find a sick person who is lonely and feels unloved and you'll find people who will encourage their suicide.