In July of 2006, I sat in a crowded Senate hearing room waiting for a pivotal vote on the
Compassionate Choice law, sponsored by State Senators Patty Berg and Lloyd
Levine. The vote was tied when Senator Joe Dun, who had been counted as a
supporter started to speak. It soon became clear that his vote was not going to
go the way we hoped. When he gave a long disquisition on how his Bishop had counseled
him of the potential harm this bill might do, we knew the battle was lost.
When he cast his nay vote, many people started to weep.
People whose loved ones had died protracted painful deaths, and were supporting
this bill to help out others in similar circumstances avoid the same fate, by
offering them a “death with dignity.”
Full disclosure, at the time I was a paid consultant to the
group
Compassion and Choices
(get it, it’s all about compassion and
choices) helping raise money in support of the bill.
Death with dignity or Compassionate Choice, as
it was called then, is the right for terminally ill patients suffering
intractable pain, in the last months of their lives, with counseling from
medical doctors and psychological professionals, to choose to end their
suffering by taking a lethal cocktail themselves.
Saunders wrote her column in response to the very moving story
of a young woman named Brittany Maynard who, suffering from a terminal brain tumor, had
moved from California to Oregon, where she would be allowed to have a death with dignity. Her
story had been told in the
Chronicle the day before.
It's no coincidence people who oppose a person’s right to end their life under
the circumstances described above, always call it “assisted suicide,” because
well, you know, suicide, not a good thing. Surely if you are contemplating
suicide, we can help. There are doctors, counselors, pills, lots and lots of pills.
Except for the one pill that might make a difference in the
case of the lives of patients, and their families, who are suffering through
the scenario above.
Saunders does get one thing right. Insurance companies are
not happy with patients who expensive demand life prolonging care, especially
if it comes with home caregivers. No. no
money for dying at home where someone has to be paid to do the messy stuff.
Saunders claims that insurance companies and “profit driven
managed health care” may be steering patients in the direction of ending their
lives. For this she quotes Marilyn
Golden of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund that “for every
individual with a happy family who’s not at risk for abuse, there are many
other individuals who may be subtly steered toward assisted suicide by their
insurance companies or pressured by their family.”
While no one can doubt that there is abuse of the aged,
disabled and dying by family members and others, opponents were able to dredge
up only one story that could be considered someone being “steered” by an
insurance company to toward offing themselves.
In that case, an insurance company refused to
pay for an expensive drug prescribed for a lung cancer patient, instead
offering a list of other drugs including,
according
to an unattributed Oregon media report “the one for physician-assisted death.”
The true villains here are not laws that allows sick people
a choice, but voracious insurance
companies, drug manufacturers, hospitals and some physicians who want to
squeeze the last penny out of consumers,
insureds and patients, with high costs, higher co-pays and guilt
inducing propaganda that push family members and loved ones to go bankrupt to
pay their bills.
In fact, in states where it’s legal, the statistics tell a
far different story ignored by Saunders (and presumably her husband whose
organization is listed among the conservative non-profits who benefit from and
contribute to, at least indirectly, Koch brother money and right wing political
causes)*
In Oregon according to the
original
Chronicle article, “since the law was enacted in 1997, 752 people have used
the drugs to die out of the 1,173 who were given prescriptions. The median age
for those who took the pills was 71 years old. Most had cancer. Just six people
under the age of 34 have taken the drug, a barbiturate called Seconal."
In fact, the young woman in the Chronicle article herself said she was not sure she'd take the drug, but, as in stories I'd heard from people in that hearing room in 2006, it is being able to have that choice that brings comfort.
Conveniently, Senator Dunn, who cast the deciding vote to
kill the bill in California, within months took a lucrative job as executive
director of the California Medical Association, which, along with the Catholic
Church, was one of the most vocal and big spending organizations opposing the bill. I suppose
becoming a priest didn’t appeal to him.
*A little research shows that The Patients Rights Council is the DBA name
of an organization called the Family Living Council, in turn funded by the Randolph Foundation, which also donates
generously to Americans for Prosperity, the Koch Brothers group and other
groups funding right wing causes and politicians. As “tax exempt” organization,
it does not have to disclose who it gets money from, but I’m not holding my
breath that the insurance companies and major medical corporations (including “profit driven
managed health care”) are not somewhere in the mix.
