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"Not wanting to burn his life’s savings doing it when he could leave that money to help his family." There are legal methods of asset protection that keep the wolves aways from one's life savings. Such tactics can be complicated. Instead of euthanasia, we should be pushing laws that are more straight forward and insure that our assets are protected when a family member endures health care costs that will ruin a family financially.

You are mistaken if you think there are only two alternatives: having a prolonged, futile, painful and expensive high-tech death, or having a deliberate lethal drug overdose.

The first has never been morally or legally required, and is very dubious ethically; and the last is murder, and results in the corruption of patients, doctors, families, and institutions.

The really humane option is a skilled, ethically-run hospice program --- and the best, if you can manage it, is in-home hospice services.

There is no medical reason for intractable pain in terminal patients. This was true even 30 years ago, and even moreso today; although one doctor told me, "I have never seen intractable pain; but I have seen intractable doctors and nurses."

The Oregon record over the past 10 years shows that virtually nobody who chose suicide, chose it because of pain. It would have been "absolutely" nobody, if they had gotten the appropriate narcotic and analgesic medication.

You might want to look at the argument that the suicide option works against palliative care , and these insights by an experienced medical practitioner as well ("What Have We Learned ABout Death With Dignity in regon in the Past Ten years?"). Of the many arguments that have been made in favor of suicide, the ones that are provably false are the ones about inevitable futile high-tech expense and/or pain in terminal cases.

Your desire not to have an artificially long-drawn-out painful death is perfectly legitimate. Have you made it clear to all your next-of-kin, and preferably your designated Healthcare Proxy, that you want sensible, quality hospice care?

Some advocates of the Oregon physician-assisted suicide system brush off criticism because they say there are "safeguards" aainst abuse.

The safegards? Zero. Oregon has no staff to investigate even the most egregious cases, no budget to pay for independent investigation, and no penalties for ANY physician action wth lethal outcome, if the physician can claim he acted in good faith," the lack of which is almost impossible to prove. The statistical analysis in their annual reports depends entirely on unverified death doctor self-reporting.

The only "protection" built into the law is that the death-dealing doctor is protected from any liability.

Take a look at this if you want a different view of Oregon's "suicide successes."

Not wanting his loved ones last memory to be watching him die a pathetic, drawn out death drugged to a haze in a hospital bed. Not wanting to burn his life’s savings doing it when he could leave that money to help his family. What a selfish decision that is.

It is selfish for someone to screw up the medical and legal systems I and my children depend on for health and freedom, so that they can have another made up right. If we really believed death with dignity was a right we'd have a 10 mile per hour national speed limit, because people who die in car accidents don't die with dignity.