Georgia replaces assisted-suicide law that was tossed out

News in brief - May 21, 2012 - amednews.com: Georgia has enacted legislation to outlaw physician-assisted suicide, replacing a law the state Supreme Court struck down in February on First Amendment grounds. The law makes it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for any licensed Georgia “health care provider” to knowingly and willfully assist in the commission of a suicide.

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Vermont senate removes assisted suicide language from bill

Burlington Free Press: For nearly two hours Thursday afternoon, the Vermont Senate focused on legislation that would allow people with fewer than six months to live to opt for a lethal dose of medication. From the start, it was clear the legislation wouldn’t pass — and it didn’t, failing on a procedural vote. The point, though, was just to have the debate, supporters said. The Senate Health and Welfare Committee had earlier this week attached the end-of-life legislation to a bill that would prohibit those under age 18 from using tanning salons.

Assisted-Suicide Doctor Invokes Law He Built

Daily Beast: Peter Goodwin is dying. He has corticobasal degeneration, a condition that resembles Parkinson’s disease, but takes a much more aggressive and lethal course. And so, in the very near future—maybe weeks, maybe months—Goodwin, a resident of Oregon, will use that state’s controversial Death With Dignity Act to end his own life. That Goodwin should find himself in this situation is a novelistic twist, considering that he was one of the doctors responsible for getting the law passed in the first place.

The Death With Dignity Act became legal in Oregon in 1997. Since then, more than 500 terminally ill patients have used its provisions to end their lives with their doctor’s help. The number of patients who opt for this course has increased every year since the law went into effect.

“I’ve been sort of surprised and disappointed by how slowly this process has grown, mostly because, of course, it runs in the face of most religious faiths. Because death really is the territory of the religious hierarchy, and the religious hierarchy is very intolerant to this new idea,” Goodwin says. “But why it hasn’t caught on with the mass of people is surprising for me.” And he does seem genuinely surprised. For Goodwin, this is a simple issue of personal freedom and autonomy. “And that’s what our country is based on,” he says. Since the law went into effect, Goodwin himself has assisted in the death of many patients.

Editor: A "novelistic twist" would be if a person who campaign against assisted suicide opted for it. Or, better yet, if a person who campaigned for it ultimately rejected it as a solution to his or her suffering.

Ga. court overturns assisted suicide restrictions

AP: Georgia's top court struck down a state law that restricted assisted suicides, siding on Monday with four members of a suicide group who said the law violated their free speech rights. It means that four members of the Final Exit Network who were charged in February 2009 with helping a 58-year-old cancer-stricken man die won't have to stand trial, defense attorneys said.

Georgia law doesn't expressly forbid assisted suicide. But lawmakers in 1994 adopted a law that bans people from publicly advertising suicide, hoping to prevent assisted suicide from the likes of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the late physician who sparked the national right-to-die debate. The law makes it a felony for anyone who "publicly advertises, offers or holds himself out as offering that he or she will intentionally and actively assist another person in the commission of suicide and commits any overt act to further that purpose." The court's opinion found that lawmakers could have imposed a ban on all assisted suicides with no restriction of free speech, or sought to prohibit all offers to assist in suicide that were followed by the act.

Obama administration halts troubled long-term health plan

Obama administration halts troubled long-term health plan - Washington Times: The Obama administration, admitting that a key part of its health care law is unworkable, has abandoned the long-term care provision for the elderly and infirm in its health care law because it could not certify that the program would ever pay for itself. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius said the agency would not continue with the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) program, effectively confirming months of analysis showing the program to be financially unsustainable.

Related: Health overhaul law suffers first major casualty

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State of physician-assisted suicide in the US

Since Oregon became the first to legalize physician assisted suicide, this issue has come up in several other states.  Many have passed laws prohibiting physician assisted suicide, while others are currently debating this issue.

Help needed to ward off assisted suicide bill in Hawaii

Jackie Mishler, of Hawaii Physicians for Compassionate Care, sends out an urgent plea to anyone in her state:

If we can stop the bill to legalize Physician Assisted Suicide in committee now, PAS is unlikely to come to hearing again this year. Please attend the hearing in person for maximum effectiveness.

The Senate Health Committee will hear testimony on SB803 on Monday, Feb 7 at 2:45 PM in the Capitol auditorium. This bill would legalize Physician Assisted Suicide. Testimony is due by Sunday, the 6th, by 4:00 PM. If you miss the Sunday deadline, please send on Monday anyway.

If you cannot attend, testimony by email or fax also helps.

• Email - (copy and paste this into your web browser): http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/emailtestimony/
• Fax - Sgt at Arms, 586-6659; Toll Free 1-800-586-6659. Identify hearing as: SB803, Feb 7, 2011, 2:45 PM, Senate Health Hearing, Capitol auditorium

When you send your testimony, please identify yourself, state your position (I oppose SB803), and tell them why you feel this would be a bad bill for you, your loved ones, or the State of Hawaii. If you are coming to the hearing, please send testimony as well. Remember, EVERY testimony counts!

See testimony from our Executive Director Tom Lothamer here.

The return of the death panels

Paul Greenberg: As every polemicist knows, the way a question is asked can determine the answer. To quote one of those experts -- a thanatopsist? -- at the University of Michigan, someone with heart disease might be asked: 'If you have another heart attack and your heart stops beating, would you want us to try to restart it?' Or someone with emphysema could be asked, 'Do you want to go on a breathing machine for the rest of your life?' Or the cancer patient would be asked, 'When the time comes, do you want us to use technology to try and delay your death?' As if anyone could know when the time will come, and how the patient will feel about it then. And please note the phraseology: It's not save your life, but delay your death. Never underestimate the power of negative thinking.

Concerns about 'death panels' overhyped

Not everyone in the pro-life movement is on board with the concerns about the “death panels” the Obama administration recently instituted, as one professor says they are overhyped.

Warren Throckmorton is an associate professor of psychology at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and fellow for psychology and public policy with the Center for Vision & Values. He believes the idea has some merit as it, for example, could have helped prevent the painful euthanasia death of Terri Schiavo at her former husband’s hands. But pro-life groups say they worry doctors would be incentivized to pressure patients into making treatment decisions that would ultimately ration their health care.

Throckmorton says the regulations don’t constitute a “death panel” because the meetings with physicians are voluntary, the patient makes his or her own treatment decisions, and helping patients with advanced directives — which could ultimately ensure they do receive lifesaving medical treatment and are not denied care — is generally a good thing. “No death panel there, just the patient, perhaps family, and the physician,” he says. “Since the conversation is voluntary, a patient can avoid the whole thing.” LifeNews

Cutting human beings

Articles & Commentary: Arizona attempted to save money by curtailing expensive procedures that were believed to be relatively ineffective. From the standpoint of hard choices and cold calculation, this principle is defensible. But there is little reason to believe that Arizona undertook the time-consuming and painstaking data collection and cost-benefit analyses that should inform such policy change. Instead, it clumsily targeted a discrete group of people with names and faces who will die without a standard procedure that is proven to be successful in so many cases.

Krugman: Death Panels Will Fix Debt Crisis

Krugman: Death Panels, VAT Will Fix Debt Crisis: Paul Krugman, NY Times columnist, apparently thinks death panels could be one way the federal government will be able to keep soaring medical costs under control as baby boomers enter retirement. Video

Editor: I thought there was no such thing as death panels in Obamacare.

Katie Beckett: Patient Turned Home-Care Advocate

After more than two years living in St. Luke's Methodist Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Katie Beckett's family reached the limit of what its private insurance would pay for Katie's care. Medicaid, the state and federal health insurance for the needy, started picking up the cost of that expensive breathing machine and other care. But Medicaid would pay only as long as the little girl lived in the pediatric intensive care unit at the hospital.

Beckett's parents, Julie and Mark, said they wanted their daughter at home. The girl's doctors agreed, saying she needed to grow up in a more normal environment than a hospital room. At first, federal officials refused to make an exception. But then Reagan was told about the family. A few days later at a press conference on Nov. 10, 1981, Reagan expressed his anger at what he called an example of a cold bureaucracy.

It cost six times as much for the girl to live in the hospital, the president said, and "this spending most of her life there and away from the home atmosphere is detrimental to her. Now, by what sense do we have a regulation in government that says we'll pay $6,000 a month to keep someone in a hospital that we believe would be better off at home, but the family cannot afford one-sixth that amount to keep them at home?"

President Reagan changed the Medicaid rules and Katie Beckett left that Iowa hospital and went home in time for Christmas. Shortly after, the government allowed exceptions in other states so that parents like the Becketts, who made too much money to qualify for Medicaid, could be covered for their children with extreme medical costs.

The real meaning of rationing

Rationing already takes place in many ways in health care. Managed care is exactly a form of rationing in which a private insurer determines whether patients should or should not receive services. In addition, private sector rationing injects profit motives into the calculations. The recent debate over health care has centered around who should do the rationing: private enterprises, often driven by profit or other private objectives, or government officials who are easily characterized as motivated by the immediate political returns of lower taxes or hiding the true shortcomings of services they administer. JAMA

Shame on the MS Society

The American Multiple Sclerosis Society issued the following statement regarding "Embryonic Stem Cell Lines Available for Federally Funded Research":

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society urges Congress to support the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007 (H.R.3 and S.5) at all levels of the legislative process. The legislation would increase the number of approved embryonic stem cell lines that can be used in federally funded research by allowing new lines to be generated from embryos that have been donated for research purposes by people using the services of in vitro fertilization clinics, while establishing important ethical protections.

[Translation: The MS Society was/is just itching to get their hands on stem cells at the cost of human life generated artificially by perverse science.] Mark Pickup

Rationing Health Care? You Bet Your Life!

If you thought all the talk about "death panels" was conservative hogwash, think again. An anti-market socialist, Berwick once decried the U.S. health system as "trapped in the darkness of private enterprise." With Berwick at the helm, Medicare and Medicaid programs are expected to cut billions of dollars in services. And why not? According to the socialist model that Berwick admires, it's much cheaper to let sick people die. FRC

Obamacare: Nominee to Head Medicare/Medicaid Loves UK’s Socialized NHS

Donald Berwick, the Obama administration’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is running into confirmation resistance because of his love affair with the NHS. Secondhand Smoke

Emotional testimony at Mass. House hearing on right-to-die bill

Called the “death with dignity act,” the bill would require that a patient requesting physician-assisted suicide initially ask for approval in writing, go through psychological screening and then verbally request the medication. Massachusetts Citizens for Life opposes the proposed bill, saying it would make it possible for patients who are mentally competent with terminal illnesses to elect to end their lives through physician-assisted suicide.The bill must be approved by the Judiciary Committee before it can go before the full House or Senate for debate and a vote. Milford Daily News

Obama healthcare proposal means rationing

Even as more and more doctors and other health care providers are leaving the Medicare program because of low government reimbursement rates – rates that under the Obama bill will decline still more in comparison to medical inflation – senior citizens will have nowhere to turn. Their only option will be tightly managed plans that provide less and less treatment. NRLC

Canada tip-toeing to the barrier of assisted suicide?

Starving to death in a hospital bed is a horrible way to die, says an expert on the ethics of death, and it may be time to allow more overt ways of ending the lives of the terminally ill. Wayne Sumner says there is no practical difference between letting someone starve to death, as is now done when feeding tubes are removed, and the more overt act of instructing a doctor to inject a lethal dose of medication to hasten death.

Not everyone agrees. Moira McQueen, director of the Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute, says every patient has the right to refuse treatment or food, and let nature take its course. "With euthanasia, you're not letting anything take its course," she says. It is too big a leap to say that because people can refuse treatment or nourishment, they should actively take their own lives, she says. "We all want to be compassionate, but we want to make sure we're doing the right thing, too." Healthzone