If you thought that Republicans had finally seen the folly of their demagoguery demonizing recommendations to include end-of-life counseling in Medicare or the Affordable Care Act, well think again.
Remember Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley suggesting that government health care reforms would lead to the government deciding when to “pull the plug on grandma.”
Or former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin warning:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Now that Medicare is planning to reimburse doctors for “conversations with patients about whether and how they would want to be kept alive if they became too sick to speak for themselves,” Conservatives are once again raising the specter of death panels.
Just listen to Betsy McCaughey at the New York Post in a piece titled, “‘End-of-life counseling’: Death panels are back.”
McCaughey continues to spread the death panels absurdities, but adds new twists to attacks on end-of-life counseling: “Dying for Dollars,” “Robbing Grandma to spread the wealth” and “it’s the perfect storm of ideology and industry greed, with hospice providers lobbying lawmakers to make end-of-life counseling the standard.”
[End-of-life counseling is] being sold as “death with dignity,” but it’s more like dying for dollars. Seniors are nudged to forego life-sustaining procedures and hospital care to go into hospice. That enriches the booming hospice industry and also frees up dollars for the left’s favored social causes.
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Why is the government meddling with how we cope with death? The Institute of Medicine doesn’t mince words. Scrimping on seniors will free up money “to fund highly targeted and carefully tailored social services for both children and adults.” Just like ObamaCare. Robbing Grandma to spread the wealth.
At the National Review, Wesley J. Smith (not an ardent Obamacare supporter), while calling health care rationing (“threatened, but not yet here”), “the real hazard,” says McCaughey’s “prescription” is “beyond hyperbole”:
To accept McCaughey’s prescription, one would have to believe that doctors don’t give a fig about their patients and greedily drool over the prospect of the unwanted and unproductive being pushed into the grave. That’s simply not true.
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More, one would have to accept the premise that hospice is not humane, but avaricious and abusive. There are horror stories, to be sure, but so many more examples of beneficence and hope in hospice. Irresponsibly trashing hospice can cause real harm to individuals and push society toward accepting assisted suicide!
Read here how Smith emphasizes the importance of advance-care planning and gives advice on how to “ensure that an advance directive doesn’t become a death panel.”
In a great piece on why end-of-life planning is important, Smith writes:
The best defense against having your life’s worth judged by a death panel isn’t hiding in a hole of denial but having “the conversation”—or better stated, conversations—about what you would and would not want at the end of your life, should you become incapable of making your own medical choices.
Please read more about this important subject — void of hyperbole and death threats — here and more about the Medicare proposals here.
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, and consults for the Patients Rights Council.
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Note: Edited to change “Affordable Car Act” to “Affordable Care Act.”
Follow Dorian de Wind on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ddewind99
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.