Legal Debate Over Doctor-Assisted Death
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2013-03-05/legal-debate-over-doctor-assisted-death
Montana’s House of Representatives passed a bill that could imprison doctors for assisting in suicide. Legislation is pending in other states to make it legal. A panel joins Diane to discuss the legal and political debate over end-of-life issues.
Guests
Thaddeus Pope
director of the Health Law Institute and associate law professor at Hamline University School of Law.
Dr. Joanne Lynn
geriatrician, hospice physician and director of the Altarum Institute Center on Elder Care and Advanced Illness.
Dr. Krayton Kerns
doctor of veterinary medicine and Republican member of the Montana Legislature.
Barbara Coombs Lee
president, Compassion & Choices, and chief petitioner of the 1997 Oregon Death with Dignity Act. She was a nurse and physician assistant before becoming a private attorney.
Comments
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Open season for assisted suicide:
http://www.efn.org/~hkrieger/xw1795.jpg
The first thing you should do, please, *please*, is STOP using the pejorative and inaccurate phrase "doctor assisted suicide." Patient directed dying when under a terminal medical diagnosis is not suicide...you're already *dying*.
Here is another instance where the republicans think they should tell other people how they should live: rather tell them when they can choose to die when there is no hope of a full life.
Yet, they claim that they are the party of freedom.
The veterinarian you are interviewing is engaging in fallacious "slippery slope" reasoning of the grossest kind. Instead of giving a reasoned response with arguments against physician-assisted suicide, he has jumped to a vision where the government mandates murder of the terminally ill. His statements are an irresponsible distortion of a topic that deserves considered debate.
Dr. Kern presented an entirely false argument when he claimed that the government is moving toward a single payor system whereby the government provides both diagnosis and help w/ dying. Our government completely took the single payor option off the table and is in FACT NOT moving in that direction. Further, we've had a single payor system for the elderly for decades and it hasn't been an issue to date.
That Montana Vet is spewing more misinformation about the affordable care act. He was implying that the Federal Government is going to start making medical decisions. That is incorrect.
The irony is that by passing this law, State Government is affecting the Patient-Doctor relationship and that's what they purport to be against.
These right wingers are against everything and have no solutions for our real problems.
There can be no greater Freedom than deciding when and how to end one own life.
IF, IF God exists, She gave me Free Will. For your guest to bring up religion while making laws is gross ignorance of the First Amendment.
The hypocrisy of the GOP and their "Less government" mantra running up against their desire to control my end of life decisions is overwhelming. Is there ANY evidence that people choosing to end their lives have been abused or coerced into these decisions? Is this yet another GOP proposed law to prevent a myth, like Voter Fraud or Iraqi wmd's? It looks to me like The GOP government ramming THEIR religious beliefs down my throat.
Wow. Dr. Kern is completely frightening.
In theory I agree with the idea of "doctor-assisted suicide," but in practice it can, and reportedly has, devolved into less care for those terminal patients who have NOT chosen this option. After the law was passed in Oregon, there were reports of hospital staff in some locations offering less care and attention to terminal patients who did select such a suicide option and in some cases either implicitly or actually suggesting to the patients and their families that they SHOULD select suicide, implying that they were using up necessary resources that could be better used on people who had a chance of survival. I find this kind of behavior appalling.
Doctors choose whom lives or dies all the time. Hospitals sentences people to death on a daily basis if they don’t have the money or insurance to pay for treatment. First do no harm would mean that you really should treat everyone that presented themselves to your door.
The doctors and hospitals that are against assisted suicide are basically against turning off the money faucet.
Diane,
I am amazed at your ability to speak with hypocritical, narrow-minded fools. The fact that the "veterinarian" brought God into his decision shows how out of touch many people in this country are with true morality and science. I would have railed that guy for being a nut. We are animals; we are primates; the fact that we can vocalize our wishes gives us full rights to choose our end of life circumstances.
Towards the end of the interview with Kerns the truth comes out: He thinks that the government will take over healthcare and institute death panels to collect tax (put on tin foil hat) and of course, the usual Christian garbage argument. What a problem, those people who constantly stifle every form of progress and curb the thing they say they value most: liberty.
GOP is hell bent on imposing their will in the beginning and end of life but those 60 70 80 years between, you are on your own jack, don't ask us for any assistance. GOP not sure why they act the way they do, but I am sure it is somehow tied to religion They impose their religious values on the rest of us
My reading of history is that the aristocracy all through the ages has had little interest in prolonging the lives of anyone beneath their stations. The peasantry were expected to do the dirty work as long as they were able, and when they became unable, well, that was that!
This sounds like the fulfillment of prophecy from the Book of Revelation: "Men will seek death and be unable to find it."
Recently, I watched my 96 year old grandmother go through 3 months of slowly dying. During those months she kept asking to die. This was particularly hard to watch because I am a veterinarian who relieves suffering in our pets. I can't understand why we as a society treat our animals with more compassion and dignity than we do people.
Elizabeth Arguelles, DVM
Once again, forcing their religious beliefs on "us." So if the physician and the patient do not believe in god or otherwise feel religion does not enter into this decision, that's just too darn bad, apparently.
Further, I can envision a scenario where the patient is suffering and on many occasions verbalizes that they want to die, which my grandmother did often, even though she was not in pain; and the physician does nothing to hasten that patient's death but, because of the law and the patient's prior utterances, the physician ends up being charged.
As a nurse with 10 years experience in pediatric ICU, I have often felt that I will be called to account in an after life for what we routinely do to patients in the name of "helping" them. We do harm every time we resusciatate a heart that cannot work on its own and is in a body that will never see, hear, speak or move voluntarily again. This sort of treatment is, to me, a form of legalized torture. God gave us brains to use and if we use them to decide to end suffering that will never be relieved, I believe that is within our duty as humans.
Please address the misinformation the vet was sharing regarding our healthcare system.... we are NOT beginning a single-payer healthcare system and the government will NOT make our personal healthcare decisions. By allowing him to state this and NOT correct him, you are giving credence to the myth. And unfortunately many people hear this and just believe it rather than doing their own research.
Hi Diane,
Please ask your guests if the phrase "God decides" is the key to unravel the argument against end of life decisions. Perhaps it is an issue of religious freedom to decide how and when we end our suffering.
Thank you.
Nancy Lory
Please comment on the notion of religious freedom - including the freedom to not partake in any organized religion - and the imposition of religious paradigms onto this decision regarding end of life care. I was quite disappointed to hear a lawmaker invoke religious criteria as justification for legal action given that our country has a basis of religious freedom and separation of church and state.
Patients have the right to refuse life-extending treatment like oxygen, etc. If they understand that this may end their life, and they choose this, why can't they make their own decision about ending their life ?
When my wife was dying of cancer she begged me to bring her gun to her so she could stop the pain and suffering. She was on the maximum morphine dose and still was in horrible pain. When I spoke to the doctor about this pain he said we had to wait for the cancer to grow in her organs and rupture to kill her. Diane’s comment about her dog being treated mercifully and the Doctors (veterinarian) comment that people are different and God is who decides death of humans is repulsive to me.
THe driving force behind preventing P.A.S is the life insurance industry. It is common and profitable knowledge that many people default on their policies at the end of their life trying to pay bills while fighting an illness.
This looks like another attempt to apply religious values to the general population. Ending life is a deeply personal decision and should not be subjected to anyone else's influence but his/her own doctor's and family.
If politicians continue to weave their personal values into the law of the land, then the church should become a taxable entity. Perhaps that would help the deficit?
We are all born and we will all die. When someone is facing their own death, as we all will eventually, allow that person the dignity to choose the circumstances they desire. It is the greatest gift we can give.
I am also a veterinarian. And as a professional who has regularly performed euthanasia on terminally ill animals, I have often wondered about the irony of a society that allows pets to undergo a merciful end, but forces some people to undergo prolonged and meaningless suffering. The legislator who is proposing this bill appeared to have a difficult time logically responding to Diane's questioning concerning comparative treatment in humans and animals, and had to resort to religious doctrine and political rhetoric to support his reasoning, rather than scientific evidence or humanitarian considerations.
Dr. Kerns' comment about the government being motivated to pressure someone to end their life early before they exhaust all their resources in order for the government to benefit from the inheritance tax is NONSENSE. The vast majority of people die with assets under the threshold to ever be subject to inheritance taxes. This ridiculous, inflammatory statement may appeal to his tea party supporters but has no basis in fact and simply serves to contaminate the conversation that we all need to be having about this very difficult but important subject.
I agree there has to be strict oversight of assisted suicide, but I also agree there are times it is needed. My mother had a stroke which left her without speech or ambulation. She lay in a bed in a nursing home for 2 years and finally turned her face to the wall, refusing nutrition or fluids. Although her doctor had marked her chart "no heroic measures", there was no other option but to let her starve to death. It took TWO WEEKS. It was cruel. We would be more considerate of an old sick dog! It has been 25 years and it still grieves me that I could not help ease her suffering.
My father was a veterinarian and I grew up in his office seeing life, pain, and death on a daily basis concerning animals. Being part of euthanasia on hundreds and hundreds of animals of all types made one realize how quick and peaceful the event is to end the animal's suffering.
Diane perhaps made one of the best 5 minutes segments she ever did when she challenged the veterinarian Dr. Kerns of how he can justify not letting ill people make a sound decision to end their life early, yet the same veterinarian can put an animal to sleep without the animals consent.
She very well pointed out the hypocritical point of view he has. Especially when he brought God into the picture, as animals and well as humans are all Gods creatures, yet humans are somehow excluded from euthanasia, and especially humans that are suffering that willingly want to pass on?
These Republicans pushing this narrow minded agenda are the same type of people that yell out "Pro Life!", yet at the same time push a "Pro War!" and "Pro Execution!" agenda.
They have no problem being radical when it comes to abortions in the US, especially right after conception when a fetus is just a cell or bunch of cells, but at the same time quickly support war and the "military induced abortions" it caused on say the 100,000 actual living breathing innocent Iraqi civilians the last 10 years. Yet they magically justify that war killing civilians "is different" than abortions.
These narrow minded people which are destructive to the freedom to choose as the US was founded on are a "clear and present danger" to the Constitution and our freedoms.
Good for Diane to hold Dr. Kerns "feet to the fire" and drill him for 5 minutes concerning his clear hypocrisy!
It's funny...the same people who like to tout the mantra of "personal responsibility" and "big government" are the same people who like to use government to legislate what a person can do with their bodies, and under what terms to end our lives!
The Sad Way We Die