In an August 6th, 2009 article titled “Death Drugs Cause Uproar in Oregon”, journalist Susan Donaldson James describes a horrifying event that occurred to Oregon resident Barbara Wagner.
“The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay. What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50. “
When I first wrote this article, I was under the impression that it was a private insurance company that rejected her service. But I was wrong: it was the state-run healthcare plan!
Why would the state-run do healthcare system do this to a person? Well, to put it quite frankly, in order to eliminate waste (and increase profits). “…Under [Wagner’s] insurance plan, she can the only receive ‘palliative’ or comfort care, because the drug does not meet the ‘five-year, 5 percent rule’ -- that is, a 5 percent survival rate after five years.”
Oregon is a state that has passed Doctor Assisted Suicide laws, called the “Death With Dignity Law”. Obviously intended originally to give terminally ill patients the ability to choose death on their own terms rather than languish in suffering for years, the law may appear on the surface to be a compassionate solution to one of the most difficult decisions a person can make.
But, in this case, instead of offering expensive care, the health plan offered a death pill instead.
I believe that it is the perfect example of how, given the option, the Federal Government will inevitably promote suicide or even euthanasia instead of “wasteful” care.
I have been researching euthanasia in Europe for a while now, and have published blogs on the topic in which I cite analysis showing how in some European states (principally Holland, although Switzerland also to a lesser degree) have begun to use euthanasia as part of their “health care” practice. No matter how well documented my sources are (even when government agency statistics are cited and links provided), I get responses from liberal friends who immediately dismiss the articles as “ridiculous lies”. Most simply refuse to read the articles. Others read parts, but then dismiss them outright.
When asked why they will not consider the articles, the response I get is: “You have a view, and you find whatever you can to support that view. Example: you hate socialism. Therefore, socialism kills the innocent.” So you just dismiss the concept from the start? “You’re absolutely right. When I hear that countries are killing their elderly, and we’re going to start doing the same, I just dismiss it.”
The next dismissal is predictable: “We would never have euthanasia in the United States.”
This was said in the context of my allegation that if we implemented single-payer healthcare in the United States, the government would inevitably head down this same morbid path, exactly as have the governments where they have socialized medicine: it is already happening.
Liberals scoff at concerns about section 1233 of the Healthcare Bill in the house currently (HR 3200), in which doctors are encouraged to discuss “end of life options”. In his article, “Undue Influence”, Washington Post writer Charles Lane explores a number of concerns people have about the government option, and openly questions whether or not the Federal Government’s plan would “force everyone over 65 to sign his…own death warrant.” Lane boldly states that his is “rubbish”.
“Federal law already bars Medicare from paying for services "the purpose of which is to cause, or assist in causing," suicide, euthanasia or mercy killing. Nothing in Section 1233 would change that.” May I point out that laws can be changed?
However, Lane adds that, having read section 1233, “it is not totally innocuous.”
“The 1997 ban on assisted-suicide support specifically allowed doctors to honor advance directives… Section 1233, however, addresses compassionate goals in disconcerting proximity to fiscal ones. Supporters protest that they're just trying to facilitate choice -- even if patients opt for expensive life-prolonging care. I think they protest too much: If it's all about obviating suffering, emotional or physical, what's it doing in a measure to ‘bend the curve’ on health-care costs?”
When we have examples like the current one, in which the “villainous” health care insurance companies not only refuse care, but suggest death instead, it is clear that the argument “it would never happen here” is moot, to say the least. There are those who are already testing the waters, right here.
So, how radical of an idea is it to suggest that, if state-run health care programs are already suggesting suicide instead of care, the Federal Government will someday do the same thing? Why are we to believe that only states will apply cost-saving analysis to care, but the Federal Government will not?
We are talking about the same US government that didn’t want to send the recommended number of troops to Iraq, in order to save money. The result? A prolonged war and unnecessary number of dead soldiers.
It’s the same government that didn’t properly equip all of the troops it sent—again, as a cost-saving measure. How many troops died unnecessarily due to these “frugal” policies?
It’s the same government that has had a “trust responsibility to provide health care for American Indians and Alaska Natives, {and yet} the Indian Health Service is substantially underfunded and understaffed.” There is no shortage of documentation supporting the allegation that our federal government has seriously underserved our Native Americans.
To quote an article by Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota who recently wrote "How Will Universal Health Care Affect Native Americans?":
"Those Americans opposed to it compare it to Canada's or Britain's health care systems, which they say are nothing but socialized medicine. The Indian Health Care system, deemed a "historic failure" by Sebelius, has also been labeled as socialized medicine, and the fact that she would label it as a failure does not place much faith in an even larger universal health care system. It just seems that every time the federal government takes total control over anything, failure is almost assured. Watch out General Motors."
He ends his article: "If you think the government can solve all of our problems ask an Indian."
Why should we believe that a government that has allowed its troops and the Native Americans to “go without” will suddenly change its stripes when we hand over the entire health care industry?
Showing posts with label euthanasia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label euthanasia. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
Euthanasia as a solution for Health Care Rationing
“I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.” The Hippocratic Oath
I was shocked, although not surprised, to learn that the medical profession in Netherlands (Holland) has not only legalized euthanasia, but has expanded its use recently. Shocked, I say, because it is horrific to think that the medical profession, which once swore by the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”, has adopted values that are in direct conflict with the oath. But I was not surprised, because this seems to be a logical outcome to the liberal philosophy that has taken control of much of Europe, and whose “humane” attempt to provide affordable access to medical care has been tempered by the practical need to reduce costs.
And what has been the logical, although horrific outcome? Euthanasia has become an acceptable alternative to expensive treatment.
The story was exposed to me by the great conservative radio host, Mike Gallagher. I wanted to verify the veracity of his statements, so I began to search, and found no shortage of corroborating articles.
What had started out as a “humane” ending of suffering for the terminally ill morphed, over time, to include an ever widening list of conditions. Recently, doctors there have even begun to euthanize the elderly, and children.
In “Euthanasia in the Netherlands”, I read a personal story about a man whose Dutch parents returned to their homeland to visit relatives, and shrugged off a story about a woman who chose euthanasia over treatment for depression following the death of her last son. Her physician did not even try to treat her depression: no, he decided she wasn’t depressed, just deeply saddened by her loss, and had the right to die—with his assistance, of course—instead of finding a new reason to live at the ripe old age of 50.
The author pointed out that many survivors of the Holocaust had managed to find new meaning in their lives after the loss of their entire families, but that was apparently unimportant. He reports:
“Over 50% of Dutch physicians admitted to practicing euthanasia, most often on cancer patients. Only 60% kept written records of their euthanasia practice and only 29% filled out death certificates honestly in euthanasia cases…”
While that statistic alone was alarming, I then confirmed that “Only half of Dutch doctors report euthanasia, report says.” In 2001, the study focused on 5500 deaths, of which 41% to 54% of those cases were patients that had been euthanized.
Proponents of the practice will rally to say that these cases provided a humane ending for individuals suffering chronic pain, with terminal illnesses, who chose to end their lives under their own terms. But that, it turns out, is not always true.
80% of Dutch now support euthanasia, in a nation that, during World War II, resisted Nazi orders to euthanize patients, actions that later resulted in the hanging deaths of Nazi “war criminals”.
But today, the practice is so widely accepted, doctors have begun to euthanize many others. In his article, “The Dutch way of Death” (2001), Richard Miniter points out that, in 1990 alone, of the 130,000 Dutchmen who died, 11,800 were “killed or helped to die” by their doctors. An estimated 5,981 people were killed by their doctors WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT—according to the Dutch government.
But if that was not shocking enough, prepare yourself: “other groups that are put to death involuntarily: disabled infants, terminally ill children and mental patients. Some 8% of all infants who die in the Netherlands are killed by their doctors, according to a 1997 study published in the Lancet, a British medical journal.”
These facts prompted the Catholic Association of Doctors and Nurses to issue a statement protesting the decision of Groningen University Hospital to euthanize children under 12 when their pain is “intolerable, or if they have an incurable illness.”
“The ‘decision proposes a death solution in situations which could be addressed by modern palliative care”, and “raises the suspicion of a financial interest of the public authorities, since it decreases the 'burden' of prolonged and expensive care in clinical conditions for which any extension of life duration is considered meaningless.’ The association continues; ‘it opens the door on a national scale to the 'mercy killing' of other mentally incompetent persons, to be eliminated without their consent for reasons based on an external appreciation of their quality of life."
In “Now They Want to Euthanize Children” Wesley J. Smith explains that, “In the Netherlands, 31 percent of pediatricians have killed infants. A fifth of these killings were done without the ‘consent’ of parents.”
"In 30 years Holland has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia of people who are terminally ill to euthanasia of those who are chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for mental illness, from euthanasia for mental illness to euthanasia for psychological distress or mental suffering, and from voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia or as the Dutch prefer to call it ‘termination of the patient without explicit request’.
It is now considered a form of discrimination against the chronically ill to deny them assisted death because they will be forced to suffer longer than those who are terminally ill and it is considered bias to force endurance of psychological pain when it is not associated with physical illness. The next step, non-voluntary euthanasia, is then justified by appealing to our social duty to care for patients who are not competent to choose for themselves. "
Smith sums up the horror quite eloquently:
“It took the Dutch almost 30 years for their medical practices to fall to the point that Dutch doctors are able to engage in the kind of euthanasia activities that got some German doctors hanged after Nuremberg.”
“Blame the radically altered mindset that results when killing is redefined from a moral wrong into a beneficent and legal act. If killing is right for, say the adult cancer patient, why shouldn't it be just as right for the disabled quadriplegic, the suicidal mother whose children have been killed in an accident, or the infant born with profound mental retardation?”
You may well ask what this has to do with us here in the United States.
According to the authors, a primary driving force in this barbaric shift from euthanizing only as a means of ending insufferable pain and misery to euthanizing patients ranging from the mentally disable, to Alzheimer’s patients, to the depressed, was the implementation of Socialized Medicine. The financial costs of treating the sick grew to the point that society might rebel against the ever increasing taxes necessary to support it. The government began to ration care, and pressured doctors to make decisions that would reduce care to those for whom it would not heal, in order to reduce costs.
Bureaucrats, in a single payer system, have been given the power of God over the public. Their actions now echo the policies of the Nazis, whose efforts to “strengthen the strain” resulted in the mass murder of millions across Europe in order to weed out the weak, the feeble, the retarded, and the incurably sick—not to mention those whose ethnic background was simply “unacceptable”.
It is logical to conclude that, as genetic testing for inherited diseases improves to the point that fetuses and babies can be identified as carrying the genes that will trigger future illnesses, doctors may decide to euthanize otherwise healthy infants or abort fetuses simply to avoid even the remote possibility of having to treat them in the future.
I was shocked, although not surprised, to learn that the medical profession in Netherlands (Holland) has not only legalized euthanasia, but has expanded its use recently. Shocked, I say, because it is horrific to think that the medical profession, which once swore by the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”, has adopted values that are in direct conflict with the oath. But I was not surprised, because this seems to be a logical outcome to the liberal philosophy that has taken control of much of Europe, and whose “humane” attempt to provide affordable access to medical care has been tempered by the practical need to reduce costs.
And what has been the logical, although horrific outcome? Euthanasia has become an acceptable alternative to expensive treatment.
The story was exposed to me by the great conservative radio host, Mike Gallagher. I wanted to verify the veracity of his statements, so I began to search, and found no shortage of corroborating articles.
What had started out as a “humane” ending of suffering for the terminally ill morphed, over time, to include an ever widening list of conditions. Recently, doctors there have even begun to euthanize the elderly, and children.
In “Euthanasia in the Netherlands”, I read a personal story about a man whose Dutch parents returned to their homeland to visit relatives, and shrugged off a story about a woman who chose euthanasia over treatment for depression following the death of her last son. Her physician did not even try to treat her depression: no, he decided she wasn’t depressed, just deeply saddened by her loss, and had the right to die—with his assistance, of course—instead of finding a new reason to live at the ripe old age of 50.
The author pointed out that many survivors of the Holocaust had managed to find new meaning in their lives after the loss of their entire families, but that was apparently unimportant. He reports:
“Over 50% of Dutch physicians admitted to practicing euthanasia, most often on cancer patients. Only 60% kept written records of their euthanasia practice and only 29% filled out death certificates honestly in euthanasia cases…”
While that statistic alone was alarming, I then confirmed that “Only half of Dutch doctors report euthanasia, report says.” In 2001, the study focused on 5500 deaths, of which 41% to 54% of those cases were patients that had been euthanized.
Proponents of the practice will rally to say that these cases provided a humane ending for individuals suffering chronic pain, with terminal illnesses, who chose to end their lives under their own terms. But that, it turns out, is not always true.
80% of Dutch now support euthanasia, in a nation that, during World War II, resisted Nazi orders to euthanize patients, actions that later resulted in the hanging deaths of Nazi “war criminals”.
But today, the practice is so widely accepted, doctors have begun to euthanize many others. In his article, “The Dutch way of Death” (2001), Richard Miniter points out that, in 1990 alone, of the 130,000 Dutchmen who died, 11,800 were “killed or helped to die” by their doctors. An estimated 5,981 people were killed by their doctors WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT—according to the Dutch government.
But if that was not shocking enough, prepare yourself: “other groups that are put to death involuntarily: disabled infants, terminally ill children and mental patients. Some 8% of all infants who die in the Netherlands are killed by their doctors, according to a 1997 study published in the Lancet, a British medical journal.”
These facts prompted the Catholic Association of Doctors and Nurses to issue a statement protesting the decision of Groningen University Hospital to euthanize children under 12 when their pain is “intolerable, or if they have an incurable illness.”
“The ‘decision proposes a death solution in situations which could be addressed by modern palliative care”, and “raises the suspicion of a financial interest of the public authorities, since it decreases the 'burden' of prolonged and expensive care in clinical conditions for which any extension of life duration is considered meaningless.’ The association continues; ‘it opens the door on a national scale to the 'mercy killing' of other mentally incompetent persons, to be eliminated without their consent for reasons based on an external appreciation of their quality of life."
In “Now They Want to Euthanize Children” Wesley J. Smith explains that, “In the Netherlands, 31 percent of pediatricians have killed infants. A fifth of these killings were done without the ‘consent’ of parents.”
"In 30 years Holland has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia of people who are terminally ill to euthanasia of those who are chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for mental illness, from euthanasia for mental illness to euthanasia for psychological distress or mental suffering, and from voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia or as the Dutch prefer to call it ‘termination of the patient without explicit request’.
It is now considered a form of discrimination against the chronically ill to deny them assisted death because they will be forced to suffer longer than those who are terminally ill and it is considered bias to force endurance of psychological pain when it is not associated with physical illness. The next step, non-voluntary euthanasia, is then justified by appealing to our social duty to care for patients who are not competent to choose for themselves. "
Smith sums up the horror quite eloquently:
“It took the Dutch almost 30 years for their medical practices to fall to the point that Dutch doctors are able to engage in the kind of euthanasia activities that got some German doctors hanged after Nuremberg.”
“Blame the radically altered mindset that results when killing is redefined from a moral wrong into a beneficent and legal act. If killing is right for, say the adult cancer patient, why shouldn't it be just as right for the disabled quadriplegic, the suicidal mother whose children have been killed in an accident, or the infant born with profound mental retardation?”
You may well ask what this has to do with us here in the United States.
According to the authors, a primary driving force in this barbaric shift from euthanizing only as a means of ending insufferable pain and misery to euthanizing patients ranging from the mentally disable, to Alzheimer’s patients, to the depressed, was the implementation of Socialized Medicine. The financial costs of treating the sick grew to the point that society might rebel against the ever increasing taxes necessary to support it. The government began to ration care, and pressured doctors to make decisions that would reduce care to those for whom it would not heal, in order to reduce costs.
Bureaucrats, in a single payer system, have been given the power of God over the public. Their actions now echo the policies of the Nazis, whose efforts to “strengthen the strain” resulted in the mass murder of millions across Europe in order to weed out the weak, the feeble, the retarded, and the incurably sick—not to mention those whose ethnic background was simply “unacceptable”.
It is logical to conclude that, as genetic testing for inherited diseases improves to the point that fetuses and babies can be identified as carrying the genes that will trigger future illnesses, doctors may decide to euthanize otherwise healthy infants or abort fetuses simply to avoid even the remote possibility of having to treat them in the future.
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