I honestly can’t believe this post is needed (can you imagine “definitive refutation of why 9/11 was not an inside job’?), but since the media insist on handing the loudest megaphone to the craziest people, this is sadly the way the debate is being framed. People are suffering greatly for lack of adequate healthcare, and we get this idiocy. Anyway, Sherwin Nuland of Yale has written an informative post in the New Republic that completely debunks the euthanasia canard. Bottom line: “There is not a single statement in the voluminous number of pages under study that contains the slightest consideration, no matter its remoteness, of death panels, euthanasia, or any such fearsome concept.”
Here are the highlights of his essay:
“In the midst of this crucial debate on the future of health care, somehow, the proponents of the euthanasia talking point seem to have forgotten everything we know about the practice of medicine in America…
In 1990, responding to several high-profile court cases–notably, those of Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan, two young women in deep and irreversible comas who were kept on life support for unconscionably long periods, even as their families petitioned for cessation month after month–Congress mandated that any health care institution receiving Medicare or Medicaid funding (which means all but a very few acute and chronic care hospitals) must, on admission, provide patients with three statements: one outlining their right to accept or refuse any type of treatment; another laying out their right to issue advance directives to ensure that their wishes about continuing life-sustaining therapy be carried out; and a third explaining any policies that govern the institution’s withholding or withdrawal of life-supportive treatments.
Though the purpose of the 1990 legislation was to ascertain that hospitalized patients would not be maintained on ultimately futile therapies, such as ventilators or feeding tubes, against their stated wishes, it also forbids anything resembling forced euthanasia, since the patient (or, in the case of incompetence, his or her legally authorized surrogate) by definition would not have requested it. Regardless, fulfilling such a request would be illegal if it were made in any of the 48 states that do not have an assisted-suicide law. And, even in the other two–Oregon and Washington–assisted suicide would certainly be viewed by the authorities as quite a different thing than forced euthanasia.
In order for patients to make knowledgeable decisions under the 1990 law, it is essential that they thoroughly discuss with their physicians the implications of the directives they are choosing, such as “do not resuscitate” orders. H.R. 3200 would, for the first time, legislate that the physician receive a fee for these discussions, making it more likely that they will take place and that they will be of real substance. From these provisions of the bill, the ignorant, the nefarious, and the just plain stupid have extrapolated that the purpose of the periodic consultations is really to determine life or death, with government officials and even physicians–heaven forfend–taking on the role of Dr. Mengele.”
What would raise serious moral issues would be for the person paying for healthcare to deny life-sustaining treatment simply on cost grounds over the family’s objections. This happens in private insurance. It has happened. Think of the Sun Hudson case in Texas a few years ago. Hudson was a baby diagnosed with a rare and fatal form of dwarfism, and removed from the ventilator that was sustaining his life in 2005. This was done by the hospital over the objections of the infant’s parent. This was a decision by a private entity, not the government. Was there outrage from the pro-life community? On the contrary, this bill was supported by National Right to Life Committee, and signed into law by somebody called George W. Bush. The same people of course seem to have no problems with the extensive coverage of abortion by the large private insurance companies.
And then there is the case I’ve mentioned before, the case of Elizabeth Anscombe’s daughter who suffered a stroke at a tragically young age. The Americans wanted to pull the plug, but her mother took her home to “socialist” Britain, where she still lives.
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