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An important factor to keep in mind when reading is this publication, “Your Life, Your Choices” which has been available through the Veterans Administration since July 2, 2009, existed under the Clinton and Bush administrations until the Bush White House read it. Bush Administration officials saw how this publication was dealing with complex moral and health issues and suspended it. But bureaucrats in the Obama administration saw fit to bring it back. Why?
Well, the first thing to look at is the author of “Your Life, Your Choices.” He is Robert A Pearlman, MD. Dr. Pearlman’s areas of expertise cover end-of-life care. But what is fascinating is that his areas of study are: euthanasia, validity of life sustaining treatment preferences, medical futility and physician assisted suicide. He has argued for physician assisted suicide before the US Supreme Court. I could search all day and not find a smatter of broad-based, middle ground appeal in what this man believes and fights for. How did this man become the voice for Veterans in the twilight of their years?
“Your Life, Your Choices” presents end-of-life choices like an MSNBC poll, pushing you toward an inevitable conclusion without rationale. The worksheet on page 21 asks you to decide if your life “is worth living”. Can you shake the blues? Do you live in a nursing home? Are you in a wheelchair? are just some of the questions leading to that conclusion. When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?
Take the case of Barbara Wagner in Oregon, one of this country’s leaders in physician assisted suicide. Barbara, 64, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Her doctors warned her she had less than six months left. She requested a new life-prolonging treatment from Oregon’s state-run health plan. The drug was refused. Instead, she was offered lethal medication to end her life.
‘It was horrible,’ Barbara told reporters. ‘I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills we will help you get them from a doctor and we will stand there and watch you die – but we won’t give you the medicine to live.
‘I told them: “Who do you think you are to say that you will pay for my dying, but you won’t pay for me to possibly live longer?”
Some of my more jaded readers will be shocked, “shocked I say!”, to discover that my attack here is not with Obama, per se. In fact, the government itself is to blame. This is what I, and many conservatives have been talking about since this whole silly socialized medicine debate began.
And don’t tell me it’s not about socialized medicine. If you are for the public option, you see nothing wrong with socialized medicine. That’s what the rest of us have a problem with. You are so myopic about solving problems with government that you honestly don’t see or comprehend the inherent dangers.
Well, here it is, laid bare. Your government bureaucrat, not your politician, and not your appointed czar, is the one you have to worry about. The individual given the authority and the power to guide and influence the kinds of decisions you make at the end of your life is the one to fear, because if you get your way, all roads will lead through one of them.
For a moment, paint the picture by partisans of the right-to-die movement, who will surely come to this pogroms defense with a terminally-ill patient with nothing but intense suffering betwixt him and death. Now picture this. You are in a wheelchair, or you had a stroke. Your doctor recommends end-of-life measures. Your life is not worth living. This escape from the burden of autonomous choice is attractive, as every liberal knows. Why make a decision someone else can make for you? Validated by a doctor no less. Once a trusted physician recommends suicide or euthanasia, many patients will feel they have no alternative but to accept.
We are crossing lines, at first slowly and now with rapidity: killing unborn children for convenience; removing tissue from live fetuses; creating embryos for destruction in research; experimenting with assisted suicide and contemplating euthanasia. Humans, it seems, become inconvenient to liberals and government at both ends of their lives.
No wonder Terry Crowley doesn’t like this pamphlet, it asks people to THINK.
It looks a lot like a form my Dad’s mental health professional did for the VA.
She was using it to decided if he needed to be given some medicine to help with depression, which he did.
Try having a,b,c,d,i,g and r. You would be depressed also.
Inspite of the fact it was taking over 50k a month on average to keep him alive for the last year, no recommendation of suicide or assisted death were made.
Only recommendations and medication to try to help improve his quality of life were made.
He was talking about ending it, before the evaluation using this form, based on the results they were able to help him to not be suicidal and give him some hope.
No surprise that the Bush administration would have opposed such an approach to help people deal with reality. They had a hard time of it also.
I must admit by itself out of context the form is very fightening.
BTW- why are the Republicans not getting private insurance and dropping out of Medicare, if a government run program is so bad ?
Jim
Are you actually comparing a system where 140 million pay for 42 million (medicare) with something that the 42 million would have to pay for themselves?
This is the depth of the argument that “public option” is competition.