Is Palliative Sedation Becoming Another Form of Euthanasia? (Obamacare echoes Cali Euthanasia bill)

Life Issues ^ | 2008 | Nancy Valko

[Free Vulcan]

I posted a vanity using the article as a source. Upon reading closer I noticed this:

"While controversial public cases like Terri Schiavo's involved removing food and water from so-called "vegetative" people without "living wills" or other documents, California's "Right to Know End-of-Life Options Act" would allow a fully conscious, terminally ill person to intentionally stop eating and drinking while being sedated until death.

However, causing or hastening death to relieve suffering is euthanasia no matter what procedure is being used and regardless of whether a person consents. And, of course, it is a very small step from allowing terminal sedation to actually allowing a faster lethal overdose.

The centerpiece of the California bill was a menu of "end-of-life" options including palliative (terminal) sedation and "voluntary stopping of eating and drinking" for people expected to die within a year. California health care providers who had ethical or medical objections to such palliative sedation were legally required to transfer the patient to a provider with no such scruples.

Given the current "right-to-die" mindset in much of medical education, this does not bode well for developing future ethical health care providers when the bill stated "Every medical school in California is required to include end-of-life care issues in its curriculum and every physician in California is required to complete continuing education courses in end-of-life care."

When pro-life, disability, and other groups of concerned citizens mounted a campaign against AB 2747, the sponsors of the bill started removing some parts of the bill to get it passed, but, as of August 2008, the bill has not passed and the opposition to it continues.

Sound familiar?

[Free Vulcan]

What I find interesting in the Obamacare bill is the term 'palliative care' mention in the End of Life Counseling options.

In the Cali bill 'palliative care' is defined and expanded to include endings one life by denying food and water. Being that 'palliative care' already includes using drugs to induce 'terminal sedation', does anyone doubt that euthanasia is what is being slipped in the Obamacare bill under the umbrella term 'palliative care'?

And how long till it becomes mandatory?

To save costs to the taxpayer of course.

Link to California bill: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/asm/ab_2701-2750/ab_2747_bill_20080222_introduced.html

[Free Vulcan]

Link to the bill:

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/07-08/bill/asm/ab_2701-2750/ab_2747_bill_20080222_introduced.html

[Nervous Tick]

>> And how long till it becomes mandatory?

Palliative care, my a$$.

I’m gonna pack my walker with HE and a primer and trundle off to find a herd of @#$%&* liberals to take out.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

For the umpteenth time:

it's THE solution for the looming Baby Boomer Social Security-Medicare funding problem, few of them will survive their first health problem.

Yet AARP, baby boomers themselves.. seems like half the population is saying, Yes! Go 'bama. Hope and change!

I'm missing something, I guess.

[Political Junkie Too]

I'd say to do it the old "Eskimo Way" and just send the elderly out to the glaciers to die.

No, wait... Global Warming has taken that option away. ;-)

-PJ

[Diogenesis]

[livius]

Remember Bambi’s “town meeting” a few weeks ago where a woman asked whether her 100 yr old mother - who was fine, happy, up and about and active but needed a pacemaker and finally got one after her daughter convinced the doctors - would be able to get what she needed under Bambi’s plan, he essentially admitted that she wouldn’t be able to be treated. He said, literally, “well, we can’t pay for everyone and she should take more pain killers.”

It was a weird statement and also a total non-sequitur. The old lady wasn’t in pain, she just needed a surgical procedure to continue to be as active as she was. I thought this would be the call to arms for seniors all over the country, but apparently it wasn’t (of course, it wasn’t reported much by the press).

So when you hear palliative care, what you’re really hearing is euthanasia.

[Shelayne]

Very interesting, and in context of that same phrasing in the O-bill, absolutely terrifying.

Thanks for posting.