The New Euthanasia
With “controlling costs” a primary goal of Obamacare, and half of all medical costs coming in the last six months of life, “rationed care” takes on a new meaning for us all.
London’s Telegraph reported Sunday that the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, known by its Orwellian acronym NICE, intends to slash by 95 percent the number of steroid injections, such as cortisone, given to people who suffer severe and chronic back pain.
“Specialists fear,” said the Telegraph, “tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as 500 pounds each for private treatment.”
Now, twin this story with the weekend Washington Post story about Obamacare’s “proposal to pay physicians who counsel elderly or terminally ill patients about what medical treatment they would prefer near the end of life and how to prepare instructions such as living wills,” and there is little doubt as to what is coming.
The Post portrayed the controversy as stoked by “right-leaning radio” using explosive language like “guiding you in how to die” and government plans to “kill Granny.” Yet, is not the logical purpose of paying doctors for house calls to the terminally ill, whose medical costs are killing Medicare, to suggest a pleasant and early exit from a pain-filled and costly life?
Let us suppose the NICE plan in Britain is adopted. And an 80-year-woman, living alone, with excruciating persistent back pain, is visited by a physician-counselor. What is he likely to advise? What conclusion would Grandma be led to by a doctor who sweetly explains what treatment she may still receive, what is being cut off, and what her other options might be?
What other options are there?
Examples of how to “die with dignity” are at hand.
Three weeks ago, Sir Edward Downes, the world-renowned British orchestra leader, who was going blind and deaf, and his wife of 54 years, who had terminal cancer, ended their lives at a Zurich clinic run by the assisted suicide group Dignitas. They drank a small amount of liquid and died hand in hand, their adult children by their side.
This is the way of de-Christianized Europe. For years, doctors have assisted the terminally ill in ending their lives. Indeed, it has been reported that indigent, sick and elderly patients who could not make the decision for themselves had it made for them.
In America, we have a Death with Dignity Act in Oregon and such suicide counselors as the Hemlock Society, which itself took the cup in 2003. Now we have Compassion & Choices, which counsels the elderly sick on a swift and painless end. Before he took to ending the lives of patients who were not terminal, but sick and depressed, Dr. Kevorkian had his admirers. Not infrequently, one reads of nursing homes where the infirm and elderly have been put to death.
Beneath this controversy lie conflicting concepts about life.
To traditional Christians, God is the author of life and innocent life, be it of the unborn or terminally ill, may not be taken. Heroic means to keep the dying alive are not necessary, but to advance a natural death by assisting a suicide or euthanasia is a violation of the God’s commandment, Thou shalt not kill.
To secularists and atheists who believe life begins and ends here, however, the woman alone decides whether her unborn child lives, and the terminally ill and elderly, and those closest to them, have the final say as to when their lives shall end. As it would be cruel to let one’s cat or dog spend its last months or weeks in terrible pain, they argue, why would one allow one’s parents to endure such agony?
In the early 20th century, with the influence of Social Darwinism, the utilitarian concept that not all life is worth living or preserving prevailed. In Virginia and other states, sterilization laws were upheld by the Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said famously, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
In Weimar Germany, two professors published “The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life,” which advocated assisted suicide for the terminally ill and “empty shells of human beings.” Hitler’s Third Reich, marrying Social Darwinism to Aryan racial supremacy, carried the concepts to their logical if horrible conclusion.
Revulsion to Nazism led to revival of the Christian ideal of the sanctity of all human life and the moral obligation of all to defend it. But the utilitarian idea — of the quality of life trumping the faith-based idea of the sanctity of life — has made a strong comeback.
And the logic remains inexorable. If government intends to “bend the curve” of rising health care costs, and half of those costs are incurred in the last six months of life, and physician-counselors will be sent to the seriously ill to advise them of what costs will no longer be covered, and what their options are — what do you think is going to be Option A?
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I hate to put a chill on your otherwise pleasant narrative, but let me add one more factor:
What if the nice young doctor sent to counsel me has heard all his life that my generation stole trillions of dollars from him and his generation, and indeed sold our country to slavery to the Chinese, to feed our spendthrift habits.
Then I try to explain to him/her that I wish to live a bit longer, and that giving me that privelege is the moral thing to do.
Pat Buchanan wrote:
“To traditional Christians, God is the author of life and innocent life… Heroic means to keep the dying alive are not necessary, but to advance a natural death by assisting a suicide or euthanasia is a violation of the God’s commandment….”
Well, there are some other Christian traditions too, such as the American Christian one of not imposing one’s beliefs on others.
Few will argue, I think, that Buchanan is wrong to be concerned about the development of a “culture of death” springing up that essentially cajoles the elderly and/or infirm into ending their lives. But it can seem that the only reason he really raised the fear of same was to then strike directly at things like Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law and to get at that which he can’t quite bring himself to plainly state: That he supports the right of government to tell a terminally-ill person not to commit suicide and to tell physicians that they cannot help those persons do so painlessly either.
Liberty, Pat, liberty.
This is exactly the kind of issue that makes the public distrust Republicans: To say that people have all sorts of economic rights and talk about the horror of having one’s income taxed at too high a level, but to then say that a terribly suffering and hopelessly ill person ought not have the right to end their life free of pain.
Of course the Dems present the flip side and discount economic rights, but the leftward drift of things over the past umpteen decades can be seen as the public agreeing with them that there are other rights even greater than the economic.
In other words, an opportunity. Will the Republicans walk their talk of limited government and limited government interference in people’s lives, or do they want the kind of disgust they engendered with the Schiavo thing? (Except even worse because at least in the Schiavo case there was some question of her intent.)
Human beings are nothing but large mammals and large mammals can die very hard and very slowly. And I believe I’ve seen a report indicating that a very large percentage of all the deaths in the U.S. today are already essentially “arranged” between patients and/or their families and their treating physicians in the form of agreements not to resuscitate or etc.
So what’s it going to be? Conservatives walking their talk and respecting people’s rights and concentrating on doing so but yet confronting the genuine, hard issue of preventing a “culture of death” from springing up? (Such as looking hard at the genuine issue Buchanan raised about “end of life counseling” and such, but which he then simply used to segue into his opposition to suicide and physician-assisted suicide.)
Or are they just going to go with what can seem their reactionary gut?
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me the public would agree with the deal that the government ought not be telling terminally ill people and their physicians what they can and cannot do, and also not be pressuring them what to do either. And I also suspect that it wouldn’t have much respect for those who get apoplectic about government “counseling” on the issue all the while still trumpeting the right of government to do the former.
“To traditional Christians, God is the author of life and innocent life, be it of the unborn or terminally ill, may not be taken. Heroic means to keep the dying alive are not necessary, but to advance a natural death by assisting a suicide or euthanasia is a violation of the God’s commandment, Thou shalt not kill.”
I wish this was the sincere view of a majority of American Christians; if it were then atrocities like the Iraq war wouldn’t have been remotely possible and untold thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians wouldn’t be dead as “collateral damage.”
I’d have more respect for the views of traditional Christians if they would advocate their deep respect for innocent life on a more consistent basis.
“Human beings are nothing but large mammals and large mammals can die very hard and very slowly.”
That ideology is exactly what is wrong with the world. The value of humans beings isn’t found in the amount of pleasure and pain found in their life. Beethoven’s last years were filled with pain and so I guess String Quartet No. 16 just wasn’t worth it. Too bad there was no government Death counseling.
Liberty is about what is necessary for life not making judgment’s about the relative values of pleasure or pain. There is no right to die without pain anymore than there is right to live without it.
Why have medical treatment and try to cure anyone if the only value we have in life is pleasure or pain? After all there is no way of knowing if we can save anyone at all so why not just hand out the opiates and let people self medicate themselves to death?
The entire basis of medicine is that human life is worth saving because it has value beyond the pleasure and pain of mere animal existence and the second you talk about euthanasian is the second you’ve ended human basis for medicine.
Hey why don’t we follow this cost saving measure and just give paramedic guns so when they come upon horrible car accident they just shoot the victims to put them out of their misery.
I mean if it’s good enough for dogs why not humans after all “Human beings are nothing but large mammals and large mammals can die very hard and very slowly.”