Oregon to fund suicide as a 'treatment option'

Oregon to fund
suicide as a
'treatment option'

The Oregon state Legislature enacted the nation's only statute specifically authorizing doctor-assisted suicide -- the "Death With Dignity Act" -- in 1994. The constitutionality of that statute was subsequently affirmed by the courts in 1996.
Oregon's law now recognizes the right of doctors to prescribe lethal doses of drugs at the request of terminally ill patients who are estimated to have less than six months to live.
(The absurdity here, of course, is that the state took away medical liberty from the patient, supposedly giving "prescription" control to the doctor based on his or her "expertise." Yet it now turns out the politicians figure they know more about medical practice than the doctors, and will

"allow" them the liberty to do what they think best, only in small dollops. Heaven forfend we should just allow the patient to buy what he or she wants over the counter, eliminating all the ethical dilemmas of the middlemen.)
But left unanswered was whether the lethal doses of prescription medications should be covered by the state health plan which subsidizes other prescriptions for the state's 270,000 low-income residents -- that is to say, whether taxpayers should be made to purchase the means of suicide for those who claim not to be able to afford it.
That question was answered last week by the Oregon Health Services Commission, which voted 10-1 that the lethal doses should be provided by the state.
Commission Chairman Alan Bates said his experience as a family physician convinced him this is a compassionate policy, intended to ease suffering. He said religious opponents have no right to impose their moral views on others.
But in fact, the imposition is precisely

the other way around.

The free choice Dr. Bates says he prefers, already exists in Oregon. The state does not limit our right to press freedom simply because it will not buy us a press. It does not limit my freedom of religion just because it refuses to build me a church.

It is one thing to say that such decisions should remain private between patient and physician -- hopefully in consultation with the family and spiritual advisers. It is quite another to say that those who oppose such things are "imposing their moral views on others," by simply declining to volunteer their own funds to pay for them.

Thomas Jefferson famously warned us that there are few things more tyrannical than to force men to pay for something they consider abhorrent. And that is precisely what Oregon's Health Services Commission now proposes, as it turns a deaf ear to the pleas of the Oregon Catholic Conference, that its taxpaying members will thus be forced to betray the values of their faith.

There are also more pragmatic grounds for sounding the warning klaxon now. At hearings before the commission, some Oregon doctors warned that distraught, poor, terminally ill patients could now face pressure to choose suicide for lack of funds for

better medical care -- or even because it's the most cost-effective option for state bureaucrats, exerting subtle pressure to "close the file" at the smallest possible expense.
"In rural communities, neither hospice care nor psychiatric care may be available for miles and miles," testified Dr. Gregory Hamilton, president of Physicians for Compassionate Care. "To offer state-funded suicide while failing to offer adequate care is unconscionable."
This is doubly true when the American Cancer Society reports cancer pain is chronically under-medicated in this nation, by doctors who fear they may be prosecuted or lose their licenses for prescribing "too much" (which is to say, enough) pain reliever for the bedridden terminally ill ... a policy dictated by the clinically insane "zero tolerance" zealotry of the Drug War, which can help drive dying patients to unnecessary desperation for lack of a few pennies worth of opium.
It's easy to grow jaded at comparisons to the expansion of government's role in Germany in the 1930s. Nonetheless, for a nation that recently celebrated a hard-won Cold War victory against the forces of totalitarian socialism,

we seem in a curious hurry (even at the state and local level) to find ever more things for the government to fund -- and thus take control of.

And it is true that Germany's National Socialists first "tested the waters" for their later and more hideous tax-funded "selections," by first providing painless deaths to the terminally ill, the mentally defective, and then the physically handicapped.

Let private hospice charities establish funds to reimburse those who doctor to the

dying indigent, if they choose. But any government funding of euthanasia invites a quick slide down that slippery slope, and should be opposed.

Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at vin@lvrj.com. The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.

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