Alas, a campaign is underway in The Netherlands to allow for the euthanasia of grandma and grandpa. Uber-bioethicist Wesley J. Smith notes,

Assisted suicide has been openly practiced since 1973, only being formally legalized in 2002. It has never been limited to the terminally ill, and the “guidelines” are not “stringent,” nor are they enforced with any vigor.  Indeed, Dutch doctors now openly engage in infanticide, nearly 1,000 people are euthanized each year who have not asked to die, and the country’s Supreme Court has made it legally available to the depressed.Those points aside, this story proves what I have stated repeatedly: The Culture of Death is never satiated. It is always hungry. It always wants more.

Photo: Hans Brinker Madurodam. Credit: Wikipedia Commons.

. . . the government is going to help [seniors] plan how they want to die. This benevolent plan is in Section 1233 (p. 424) of the health care reform bill known as “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009″ (HR 3200).  It didn’t just show up on the doorstep of health care reform, but was packaged and delivered by Compassion & Choices (C & C), the assisted-suicide advocacy group previously known as the Hemlock Society.

Under Section 1233, a doctor would be paid for having an “advance care planning consultation” with a patient.  The consultation wouldn’t be mandatory, at least for now.  But if the doctor wants to get paid for it, the consultation’s contents are very specifically prescribed.  For example, each consultation “shall include” an explanation of legal documents such as living wills and durable powers of attorney, and information about the “continuum of end-of-life services.“ Patients need not be ill but, because they are over a certain age, their doctors will suggest that it’s time to talk about death.

The background of Section 1233 sheds some light on its inclusion in the health care reform bill.

According to C & C’s newsletter, the organization has worked long and hard for such language, which is “part of a great advance in end-of-life care, building upon several years of thoughtful and strategic groundwork.”  C & C proudly acknowledges its leadership role in placing Section 1233 in the bill: “Compassion & Choices and its supporters have worked tirelessly with supportive members of Congress to include in proposed reform legislation a provision requiring Medicare to cover patient consultation with their doctors about end-of-life choice (section 1233 of House Bill 3200).” . . .

C & C has worked hand in hand with Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer who it describes as a “long-time supporter of individual choice.”  Indeed, Blumenauer has been an outspoken supporter of Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, the “Death with Dignity Act.”  During a floor speech in 1998, he stated:

“In Oregon, our legislation, Death with Dignity, is still a work in progress, but the fact is the preliminary evidence suggests that this option may actually reduce the incidence of violent suicide while easing the burden on both the individual and their family….”As we age as a society, exponentially, with the increase of the elderly population, and just the growth in our population, this will become more serious….The evidence suggests that Americans support the principles of Death with Dignity.” . . . Writing about Section 1233 in the Huffington Post, Blumenauer stated, “Actually, I know a little bit about this section because it’s a bill that I wrote which was incorporated into the overall legislation.”

So there you have it. Congressman Earl Blumenauer, death dealer. Fortunately, we poor Lycans have our own means of dealing with legislation such as this proposed by the good congressman. It’s called contacting our representatives.

HT: Wesley J. Smith at Secondhand Smoke.

The nation’s largest faith-based organization of physicians warned Wednesday of the potential for pro-suicide ideology to seep into law and government policy. More specifically, the Christian Medical Association (CMA) pointed to the pro-suicide influence in a controversial Veterans Administration (VA) manual and a section of the main House healthcare overhaul bill.

“As physicians, we recognize the value of advance planning and counseling and appointing a personal healthcare proxy,” commented Dr. Gene Rudd, senior vice president of the 16,000-member CMA. “The VA manual goes a step further, however, subtly raising with vulnerable patients the possibility that physical impairments might make their lives, in the words of the manual, ‘not worth living.’

The 52-page manual, entitled, “Your Life, Your Choices: Planning for Future Medical Decisions,” lists scenarios such as being in a wheelchair, needing kidney dialysis, or requiring a feeding tube and then asks the patient to consider whether those situations might make his or her life “not worth living.” It also includes guilt-inducing scenarios such as “I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being,” “I am a severe financial burden on my family” and that a veteran’s situation “causes severe emotional burden for my family.”

“When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?” posed Jim Towey, president of Saint Vincent College and founder of the nonprofit Aging with Dignity, in a recent opinion piece featured in the Wall Street Journal. “One can only imagine a soldier surviving the war in Iraq and returning without all of his limbs only to encounter a veteran’s health-care system that seems intent on his surrender,” added the former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.

Simply horrible. When will the madness end? Perhaps in 2012.

Asked whether the proposed reforms would be good for the quality of medical care in America, those responding “good” fell from 47 to 35 percent, while those responding”bad” rose from 20 to 36 percent (January/July poll comparisons).

Clearly, for Team Obama the numbers are headed in the wrong direction.

You can access the Harris poll here.

Some terminally ill patients in Oregon who turned to their state for health care were denied treatment and offered doctor-assisted suicide instead, a proposal some experts have called a “chilling” corruption of medical ethics. Since the spread of his prostate cancer, 53-year-old Randy Stroup of Dexter, Ore., has been in a fight for his life. Uninsured and unable to pay for expensive chemotherapy, he applied to Oregon’s state-run health plan for help.

Lane Individual Practice Association (LIPA), which administers the Oregon Health Plan in Lane County, responded to Stroup’s request with a letter saying the state would not cover Stroup’s pricey treatment, but would pay for the cost of physician-assisted suicide. “It dropped my chin to the floor,” Stroup told FOX News. “[How could they] not pay for medication that would help my life, and yet offer to pay to end my life?” The letter, which has been sent to other terminal patients throughout Oregon, follows guidelines established by the state legislature.

Oregon doesn’t cover life-prolonging treatment unless there is better than a 5 percent chance it will help the patients live for five more years — but it covers doctor-assisted suicide, defining it as a means of providing comfort, no different from hospice care or pain medication. “It’s chilling when you think about it,” said Dr. William Toffler, a professor of family medicine at Oregon Health & Science University. “It absolutely conveys to the patient that continued living isn’t worthwhile.”

Signs of a forthcoming federal program? Stay tuned.

HT: FRCblog.com.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee today [June 22] defeated on a party-line vote an amendment offered by Senator Michael Enzi of Wyoming, the ranking Republican member to the pending health care restructuring bill that would have prevented the use of “comparative effectiveness” research methodologies as a basis for denial of benefits to patients against their will based on their age, expected length of life, or of the patient’s present or predicted disability or quality of life.  Senators Enzi, Gregg, Coburn and Burr spoke in favor of the amendment.

In one example in the medical literature, an attempt was made to assess different “quality adjusted life year” scores for each of the following: “no physical disability, limp, walk with crutches, and need a wheelchair.” [i] In another, the authors wrote, “[I]t may be judged that one year of life with a moderate disability is equivalent to 0.75 years of life at optimal health.”[ii]

Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md) lead the opposition to the amendment, claiming it was unnecessary.  However, while the existing bill language says that comparative effectiveness research such as this “shall not be construed as mandates FOR payment, coverage, or treatment,” nothing in the current bill prevents it being used to DENY treatment.

President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don’t stand to gain from the extra care.

In a nationally televised event at the White House, Obama said families need better information so they don’t unthinkingly approve “additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care.”

He added: “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”

I don’t know about you, but I do not like the idea of any government involvement at this vulnerable and ultimately exploitable stage of life. Especially when professional periodicals like the June 11 Oncology Nursing News, reporting from a research paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Phelps AC, et al. JAMA. 2009;301:1140-1147), seek to establish a link between religion and futile end-of-life-care:

Compared with persons with a low level of religious coping, individuals who had a high level of religious coping at the start of the study were 3 times more likely to receive mechanical ventilation and intensive life-prolonging care in the last week of life. They were also more likely to prefer “heroic measures”—wanting everything possible done to keep them alive. Finally, those with a high level of religious coping engaged in less advance-care planning (eg, do-not-resuscitate orders, living wills, and healthcare proxy/durable power of attorney matters) than their counterparts who did not lean as heavily on religion.

Note the president’s concern that families may “unthinkingly approve” certain end-of-life treatments, coupled with “high level of religious coping” and “lean. . . heavily on religion.” The case is being established, folks.