Obama's book of death

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
Obama's book of death
16
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 11:54am

Turns out there already is a health care book of death written by our government. It was apparently created by the Clinton administration, cast out by Bush, and has now returned to "help" those it "protects" under Obama (Obamacare?).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574358590107981718.html

The Death Book for Veterans

Ex-soldiers don't need to be told they're a burden to society.

If President Obama wants to better understand why America's discomfort with end-of-life discussions threatens to derail his health-care reform, he might begin with his own Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). He will quickly discover how government bureaucrats are greasing the slippery slope that can start with cost containment but quickly become a systematic denial of care.

Last year, bureaucrats at the VA's National Center for Ethics in Health Care advocated a 52-page end-of-life planning document, "Your Life, Your Choices." It was first published in 1997 and later promoted as the VA's preferred living will throughout its vast network of hospitals and nursing homes. After the Bush White House took a look at how this document was treating complex health and moral issues, the VA suspended its use. Unfortunately, under President Obama, the VA has now resuscitated "Your Life, Your Choices."

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?

One can only imagine a soldier surviving the war in Iraq and returning without all of his limbs only to encounter a veteran's health-care system that seems intent on his surrender.

I was not surprised to learn that the VA panel of experts that sought to update "Your Life, Your Choices" between 2007-2008 did not include any representatives of faith groups or disability rights advocates. And as you might guess, 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. America's 24 million veterans deserve better.

Many years ago I created an advance care planning document called "Five Wishes" that is today the most widely used living will in America, with 13 million copies in national circulation. Unlike the VA's document, this one does not contain the standard bias to withdraw or withhold medical care. It meets the legal requirements of at least 43 states, and it runs exactly 12 pages.

After a decade of observing end-of-life discussions, I can attest to the great fear that many patients have, particularly those with few family members and financial resources. I lived and worked in an AIDS home in the mid-1980s and saw first-hand how the dying wanted more than health care—they wanted someone to care.

If President Obama is sincere in stating that he is not trying to cut costs by pressuring the disabled to forgo critical care, one good way to show that commitment is to walk two blocks from the Oval Office and pull the plug on "Your Life, Your Choices." He should make sure in the future that VA decisions are guided by values that treat the lives of our veterans as gifts, not burdens.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 12:05pm

I would be reluctant to make any kinds of judgments about the content of a VA pamphlet based solely on the emotional rhetoric in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. One would think that conservatives learned a lesson about premature jumping to conclusions on the basis of biased and un-informed pronouncements from, say, FaceBook. But apparently not.

I remember the Terri Schiavo debacle--she had no legal document clearly communicating her wishes. Apparently, conservatives figure we won't recall what a mess that was. Or maybe they learned nothing there either. Play to paranoia and fear. Same old, same old.

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 12:26pm

Did some digging. Found a link to the actual document. http://www.rihlp.org/pubs/Your_life_your_choices.pdf Readers can make their own choices about the characterization of the Jim Towey WSJ piece rather than accept his perception as absolute truth.

I scanned the document and am having a very hard time seeing it as "a death book" to encourage euthanasia or suicide. Seems a straightforward approach to planning for the inevitable. IMHO, Towey is interested in fear-mongering along the lines of Sarah Palin's "death panel" nonsense.

His "'If I'm a vegetable, pull the plug'?" fulminating is revealed in the pamphlet to be a statement which needs far more clarifying:
"Here's another example. Have you ever heard
anyone say, “If I’m a vegetable, pull the plug”?
What does this mean to you? What's a vegetable?
What's a plug? Even people who live together can
have very different ideas about what the same words
mean without knowing it."

Seems to me that conservatives are dredging the bottom of the barrel in their efforts to totally derail health care reform. Too bad. There are plenty of reasons to debate the issue based on real concerns; rather than trying to manufacture controversy ("astroturfing"). They must be terribly insecure.

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 1:43pm

Common sense to lay down exactly

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 2:56pm

I simply do not understand how thinking about or preparing a living will (which the counseling "death panel" clause in one version of the health reform bill was meant to facilitate; and which is also the main purpose of the VA pamphlet) can be so horribly distorted and used to frighten the bejeebbers out of the credulous. If you want extraordinary measures for yourself, regardless of recovery chances, you have every right to say so. Ditto if you don't want to be hooked up to tubes and machines.

Have always told my children to be as fully informed as possible when it comes to decision making. Do the fearmongers believe that being informed about possible choices and exercising a measure of self-determination, somehow accelerates one's demise?

Seems to me like another example of burying head in the sand. Mortality will go away if it's not seen or recognized! Yeah, right.

Just think. Though she was very young and couldn't possibly have been expected to anticipate her debilitating collapse, Terry Schiavo might have had a written and legal document expressing her wishes--either to live on life support or to be allowed to leave when her body was no longer able to sustain itself. And the whole circus of her husband fighting her parents, and the subsequent political involvement of such august personages as Bill Frist ******gasp, cough, choke, wheeze**** would have been avoided.

Would that truly have been so awful?

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-04-2009
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 4:09pm

I followed your link to the actual pamphlet and read it. I see no problem with how it is laid out or the questions it encourages people to ask of themselves in preparation of a document so that THEIR wishes are carried out. Bravo to the writers for asking people about their spirituality and what levels of care they would find tolerable and worthwhile. Those worksheets seem to be a reasonable way to chart out one's preferences/tolerances. Any veteran, particularly one who has been in battle, would not likely read that pamphlet and decide life wouldn't be worth living or assume that the pamphlet is persuading them that they should simply die. The writer of the article is a fear mongerer and should consider being more honest with the readers at the Wall Street Journal. I noted that the WSJ article didn't provide a link to the pamphlet. Perhaps they reasoned that if people actually read the pamphlet, they would recognize that the author of the WSJ article has an agenda that doesn't include an honest discussion of the subject. In fact, when you link to the actual WSJ article, the author hawks his own product "Five Wishes." Here's a link to the 5-page product:

http://www.learningplaceonline.com/stages/together/wishes/wishes-1.htm

 

Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 4:28pm
Well said. It's ironic that conservatives have wrapped themselves in the cloak of being very religious and still have an unnatural fear of death. We're all going to die, some want the choice to discuss it with loved ones and doctors whether or not they want to be resuscitated and kept alive by life support and don't want government intervention. You don't want the conversation, you don't have to have it but why prevent others from it? Smaller government, as it is. Oh, "smaller" government,that sounds...um, like a conservative principle.










iVillage Member
Registered: 08-30-2002
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 4:57pm

Interesting. My parents actually were given this pamphlet by the VA. The VA that has kept my dad alive with lymphatic cancer for.....ten years now. He was initially given 2 to 5 years to live (7 years being the longest anyone with his type of cancer has ever lived), but he keeps going and going and going. Yeah...they are really pushing them into the grave as fast as they can, obviously.


Phffffft!



iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 6:45pm

I see one significant difference between the Five Wishes document and the one from VA. 5W is $5 (though the charge is mentioned in another place as a suggested contribution). VA's is free. Also seemed to me that the VA version placed more emphasis on the process of making up one's mind than 5W.

Hard to say whether Towey's motives are for "shekels" or "shine". Am guessing "shine". Aging With Dignity seems to be actively hostile to VA, since there are five links on their home page touting 5W and lambasting VA (http://www.agingwithdignity.org/). But it's a shame that Towey seems to feel compelled to belittle or demonize the VA work in order to elevate HIS product. And the omission of context, as per usual, deliberately skews reader perceptions. IMHO, that's execrable and immoral, particularly for a man of faith; or would that adjective be appropriate for Mother Teresa's lawyer?

I wonder if Rupert Murdoch is using the WSJ as a vehicle for conservative political push. There are still worthwhile journalists (David Wessel comes to mind) but seems to me that the WSJ is going the way of Fox, at least in its op-eds.

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-22-2009
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 8:05pm

~only to encounter a veteran's health-care system that seems intent on his surrender.~

"Seems" is the key word, given how out of context the op-ed writer takes various sentences to construct a boogeyman scenario.

Pamphlet of self directive care vs book of death. Hm ;)

http://www.rihlp.org/pubs/Your_life_your_choices.pdf

Having been through these discussions recently with one of our kids, in re: to just how much intervention she is willing to put herself through the next time around in CRCU, I can say it was tough, her answers were hard to hear, but very important.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Sat, 08-22-2009 - 8:55pm

Before the printing press was invented when Vulgate was the language of the Bible, gatekeepers in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, controlled Christianity. They didn't want the common man to be able to read or interpret for himself (no "herself", in those days the number of literate women was much less than the number of literate men--and there weren't very many of them either). Possessing the Bible in one's own language was considered heretical and punishable by death. People were burned at the stake.

Today, a lot of Christians are kept in line by fear of the hereafter. Small wonder they flinch at at the thought of death when their own belief systems promise eternal damnation for stepping off "the straight and narrow". People like the Jim Toweys of this world use BOTH religion and politics to extend their sphere of influence. Scum of the earth, IMHO, regardless of friendship with Mother Teresa. No different from the extremists of Islam or Hinduism.

Access to information and the ability to think critically is POWER. Power of self-determination is a real threat to the fundamentalists. If you don't listen to somebody telling you what to believe in, you might conceivably think for yourself and demand facts instead of dogma. And there are a LOT of humans whose power base, both in religion and in politics, would be neutralized if not toppled, by such brazen effrontery.

Just my random thoughts.

Jabberwocka

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