VA Denia of Care DeathBook
'Your Life, Your Choices,' Stopped by Bush, Revived by Obama
By
Tom Blumer (Bio | Archive)
August 20, 2009 - 15:16 ET
If you were a reporter trying to gauge the credibility
of Obama administration protests that it is really serious when it says that it
will honor patient, doctor, and family treatment wishes in serious illness
situations if the government takes an exponentially greater role in health
care, you might look into how areas of health care already controlled by the
government are dealing with these sensitive matters.
Apparently either no journalist has cared to look,
or if anyone has looked, they haven't found anything they believe is worth
reporting.
In today's Wall Street Journal, Jim Towey, a former
director of the Bush White House's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives and
founder of the nonprofit Aging with
Dignity, found a troubling, newsworthy, death-encouraging decision that has
already been made during Barack Obama's short term in office.
As
Towey chronicles and explains, it's in the Veterans Administration, and it
really is appalling. Here are key excerpts from his column (bolds are mine):
If President Obama wants to better understand why
Last year, bureaucrats at the VA's
Who is the primary author of this workbook? Dr. Robert Pearlman, chief of ethics evaluation for the center, a man who in 1996 advocated for physician-assisted suicide in Vacco v. Quill before the U.S. Supreme Court and is known for his support of health-care rationing.
"Your Life, Your Choices" presents end-of-life choices in a way aimed at steering users toward predetermined conclusions, much like a political "push poll." For example, a worksheet on page 21 lists various scenarios and asks users to then decide whether their own life would be "not worth living."
The circumstances listed include ones common among the elderly and disabled: living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair and not being able to "shake the blues." There is a section which provocatively asks, "Have you ever heard anyone say, 'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?" There also are guilt-inducing scenarios such as "I can no longer contribute to my family's well being," "I am a severe financial burden on my family" and that the vet's situation "causes severe emotional burden for my family."
When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?
..... only one organization was listed in the new version as a resource on advance directives: the Hemlock Society (now euphemistically known as "Compassion and Choices").
This hurry-up-and-die message is clear and unconscionable.
Worse, a July 2009 VA directive instructs its primary care physicians to raise
advance care planning with all VA patients and to refer them to "Your
Life, Your Choices." Not just those of advanced age and debilitated
condition—all patients.
Towey wraps by challenging the president "to walk two blocks from the Oval Office and pull the plug on 'Your Life, Your Choices.'"
Don't hold your breath, Jim -- waiting for the president to make the walk, or waiting for anyone else in the press to note a federally-controlled health care system that is realizing the worst fears of those who believe in the dignity of life.