Now
that the assisted suicide movement believes it has some winds in
its sails, its pretense of being reasonable and measured is collapsing
under the ideological zeal that drives the movement. Case in
point:
The head of Compassion and Choices, Barbara Coombs Lee, has written an
outrageous piece in the Huffington Post, that libels health care
providers as torturers. From her piece:
In this country we usually torture people before we
allow them to
die of whatever is killing them — cancer, emphysema, the multi-organ
failure of diabetes or heart disease…Our medical-industrial complex
follows a cultural paradigm to do as many things to people near death
as is medically possible. Our broken system rewards that paradigm with
fee-for-service payments.
Standard routine is to torture those in the process
of dying by
inflicting upon them a host of toxic chemicals, invasive machinery and
painful surgeries. It’s the American way of dying — agonized and
prolonged imprisonment in an intensive care unit, pinned down under a
maze of tubes and machines, enduring one medical procedure after
another, unable to hold or be held by loved ones.
What shameless and false demagoguery. The vast majority of people in
this country do not die in ICU units. Hospitals aren’t prisons. Doctors
aren’t torturing people, they are trying to treat them, which can be
painful to be sure, but much effort is made to control painful and
uncomfortable symptoms. Nobody ties people down and forces them
to
have chemotherapy, surgery, kidney dialysis, etc. Most people are
desperate for these interventions–even when the doctor advises against
because they are unlikely to do much good. Moreover, most care
these
days is not fee for service, it is managed care through the HMO system.
Fee for service to physicians under Medicare is hardly a cornucopia,
and in fact is being continually cut–including in the new health care
plan.
But she isn’t just implying that physicians are torturers, she accuses
them of being sadistic:
Oncologists entice their dying patients into bearing
one more,
experimental round of chemotherapy almost certain to intensify toxic
symptoms without extending life. Surgeons repair the fractures and
amputate the limbs of people clearly only a few weeks from death. The
newest medical specialists, “hospital intensivists” deftly thread tubes
into failing hearts and attach ventilators to decrepit lungs. Much of
the pain they inflict does nothing but monitor the chemistry and
pressures of internal crevices and gather the information necessary to
thwart a body trying to shut itself down.
I know that Coombs Lee knows this isn’t true. She is well aware that
Futile Care Theory is charging down the tracks, which is explicitly
intended to prevent patients from receiving life-extending care when
the bioethicists think the quality of their lives aren’t worth the
money spent.
And then, shifting gears, she attacks health care costs at the end of
life. Does she want assisted suicide as a cost saving? You know
she
does, but doesn’t say it. Does she want futile care legally
imposed?
That would appear to be true, but she doesn’t say it. She just tells
readers to call Congress and urge reform to stop the financial
bleeding. But she doesn’t really say what policy she would like to see
enacted.
But the conclusion to her piece is just window dressing. Her
purpose
was to alienate people from their doctors and panic them into
supporting assisted suicide, which ironically, would be provided by the
same physician “sadists” she castigates. What a shameless piece of
propaganda.
Contact: Wesley J. Smith
Source: Secondhand Smoke
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Date: July 15, 2009
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human family who are threatened by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia. Diverse though we are, we hold one common belief - that
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