“We Can’t Pay For Your Chemo, But Here Is Some Nice Hemlock For You”
by Tom McClusky
July 29, 2008
Oregon, the first state in the country to allow physician-assisted suicide, has come up with an ethical conundrum that I hope Washington state is paying attention to as they debate following in Oregon’s grim footsteps. Apparently the Oregon Health Plan has informed a woman fighting lung cancer that they will not pay for her treatments, but “if she chose” they WILL pay for her “doctor-assisted suicide.”
As we have seen in the Netherlands, allowing so called physicians to kill their patients is a very slippery slope. As described by Dr. Herbert Hendin, a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention: “Over the past two decades, the Netherlands has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress and from voluntary euthanasia to non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia.”
Is this really the value we put on human life?
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Comments
I have to say I’m a little confused here.
The way this is worded one might think you supported socialized healthcare, are outraged that someone isn’t having their treatment payed for by the state and it’s just state funded patient chosen suicide you object to.
I was always under the impression that the ideology of this site is that government paying for treatment (socialized healthcare) is considered a bad thing. I even remember a column by Tony Perkins praying that it never comes about.
By: Jerry Jennings | July 31, 2008 at 9:28 am
If someone is suicidal or wants to put an end to his own suffering, he will find a way to do it, with or without legal options or a physician’s assistance. There are plenty of other books to refer to; “The Peaceful Pill Handbook” comes to mind, and that can be purchased at Amazon. As for myself, if I was determined to die, I would want to die with some amount of peace, dignity, and freedom from pain … rather than blowing my brains out all over the wall or jumping off a building and splattering all over the sidewalk!