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Unable to guarantee adequate medical care for its citizens, the Quebec Government is turning to euthanasia. The law would allow 14 year olds to refuse treatment without the consent of their parents. Also in the French version, other witnesses including Luc describe the potential abuses by politicians, hospital administrators, the medical profession and families in a money driven society where certain lives would be deemed less worthy to live because of financial pressures.

A high proportion of deaths classed as euthanasia in Belgium involved patients who did not ask for their lives to be ended, a study found. More than 100 nurses admitted to researchers that they had taken part in 'terminations without request or consent'. Although euthanasia is legal in Belgium, it is governed by strict rules which state it should be carried out only by a doctor and with the patient's permission. The disturbing revelation - which shows that nurses regularly go well beyond their legal role - raises fears that were assisted suicides allowed in Britain, they could never be...

Many old people now fear Dutch hospitals. More than 10% of senior citizens who responded to a recent survey, which did not mention euthanasia, volunteered that they feared being killed by their doctors without their consent. One senior-citizen group printed up wallet cards that tell doctors that the cardholder opposes euthanasia. The path to the death culture began when doctors learned to think like accountants. As the cost of socialized medicine in the Netherlands grew, doctors were lectured about the importance of keeping expenses down. In many hospitals, signs were posted indicating how much old-age treatments cost taxpayers.

to death on the NHS Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors warn today. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death. Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask the signs...

Conservatives in the United States are generally opposed to what they believe are Obama’s health-care plans. It seems to this observer (who, admittedly has not had time to examine the matter in as much detail as he would like), that some of the opposition is definitely misdirected.

first heard Dick Morris make this point. The main reason, electorally, that Obamacare is falling apart is that the elderly are rejecting in great numbers. Morris cites a poll in which elderly reject the plan by about 16 points. This is a massive political problem because folks over 65 have about a 70% voting attendance. About 30% of all health care expenses are spent on the last year of someone's life. So, it is the elderly that are the most affected by any health care reform idea. Frankly, the elderly are rejecting Obamacare with good reason.

Here's a way for America to cut its spiraling healthcare costs: ice floes. This idea isn't mine. It's President Obama's. Or rather, it's where we're likely to end up if the president prevails on Congress to pass the adventurous healthcare reform proposal currently being discussed, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cost about $1 trillion over the next 10 years. That's on top of Medicare's annual $327-billion budget, whose massive deficits, if they continue at the same rate, are predicted to bankrupt the Medicare system by the end of the next decade. In looking for a way to fund...

A Canadian judge is due to decide this week whether to renew a temporary injunction against Winnipeg's Grace General Hospital, whose doctors want to detach an 84-year-old Orthodox Jew from a respirator and hasten his death, against his family's wishes. However, it was learned Sunday that the patient, Samuel Golubchuk, regained consciousness several days ago and appears to be improving. Although a hospital doctor treating Golubchuk wrote "Awoke" on his chart, the hospital did not disclose this to the court. The family said the hospital had been trying to make the patient appear to be dying and with minimal brain...

A woman who has been in a coma-like state for more than six years awoke for three days this week to talk with family members and eat her favorite foods before relapsing. “She was smiling and grinning and told my staff she wanted to go to a club, even doing a little chair dance in her wheelchair,” said one of her doctors, Randall Bjork. The woman, Christa Lilly, 49, suffered a cardiac arrest in November 2000. Since then, her mother, Minnie Smith, has been caring for her at home. Ms. Smith said Ms. Lilly had awakened five times, sometimes for...

The California Legislature has been on a one month hiatus after six months of session. I have often compared the legislative process to a roller coaster ride, and following that analogy, the first six months of session are sort of like the part of the roller coaster where the ride takes the riders higher and higher with the chain underneath. Everyone on the ride knows that the higher the ride goes, the wilder the ride will be when the car finally goes into free fall. This year the roller coaster ride had a couple of interesting dips, the largest being...

The case of Terry Wallis, an Arkansas man who suddenly woke up from a 19-year long coma, has raised new questions about the death of Terri Schiavo, who died last year after a court ordered her feeding tube to be disconnected. Wallis fell into his coma in 1984 after a serious car accident. At the time he was 19. According to LifeSiteNews.com, the doctors who have studied the Wallis case have published their initial conclusions in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The report explains that during the car accident Walls’ nerve connections in his brain were severed, putting him in...

Senior doctors have joined the opposition to Lord Joffe's Bill that would allow them to help terminally ill patients to die. Twenty-four consultants who specialise in palliative care say that the attempt to legalise assisted suicide is a "bad solution to a difficult problem". In a strongly argued letter to The Daily Telegraph they say that the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, which has its second reading in the Lords on Friday, is deeply flawed. They say the Bill "overturns without a thought the medical ethic of avoiding malevolence and the criminality of assisting suicide" and they fear...

The Florida judge who presided over the Terri Schiavo case and ruled her feeding tube should be removed told a bioethics symposium that lawmakers are ill-equipped to make right-to-die decisions. Pinellas County Circuit Judge George W. Greer, in brief remarks at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday, said that 30 state and federal judges painstakingly reviewed the many volumes of testimony and evidence submitted in the divisive case. But state lawmakers who passed "Terri's Law" to have the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube reinserted did so with "little to no debate" and with "significant arm-twisting," he said. "Do you want that...

For hundreds of years, doctors have been involved in executions. But their efforts to get out of this grisly business put them on a collision course this week with a federal judge who ordered that they assist in killing a California inmate. "There's been an attempt to medicalize executions all the way back to the French Revolution," when Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin invented the guillotine as a humane method of death, said University of Minnesota bioethicist Dr. Steven Miles. "Doctors then got involved again in designing electrocution for the same reason in the United States," he said. "The medical profession has...

As the yearslong battle between Michael Schiavo and Bob and Mary Schindler came to a head in March, the case drew in Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Vatican and the White House. National TV networks chronicled every twist of the hot-button issue. Michael Schiavo wanted to carry out what he said were his wife's wishes not to be kept alive artificially. The Schindlers disputed their daughter had such end-of-life wishes and had held out hope that she could have improved with therapy. They said she had interacted with them. The dispute nearly created a constitutional crisis. Congress, the president...

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Three days after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, staff members at the city's Memorial Medical Center had repeated discussions about euthanizing patients they thought might not survive the ordeal, according to a doctor and nurse manager who were in the hospital at the time. The Louisiana attorney general's office is investigating allegations that mercy killings occurred and has requested that autopsies be performed on all 45 bodies taken from the hospital after the storm. Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard said investigators have told him they think euthanasia may have been committed. "They thought someone was...

Doc's outrage on disabled Outburst ... Owen Lister     By JOHN COLES A RETIRED GP sparked fury yesterday by saying disabled kids should be guillotined to save cash. The outburst by Owen Lister, 79, a Tory councillor and deputy mayor, came in a council meeting over funding to care for such youngsters.Mr Lister said it was too expensive to look after severely disabled children — and the money should be used elsewhere.The Disability Rights Commission said: “It’s chilling that an elected representative with responsibilities for deciding on support to disabled children should view the slaughter of innocents as legitimate...

In his first public comments since his wife's death, Michael Schiavo said today that ''I never, in my entire life, thought I would be thrown into such a national debate.... All I wanted to do was carry out my wife's wishes.'' Schiavo spoke at a conference in Minneapolis on medical ethics as several dozen protesters marched outside the Hyatt Regency Hotel where the conference was being held. Wiping away tears, Schiavo described his last moments with his wife, Terri, who died in March after a dramatic court battle to remove her feeding tube. ''Terri didn't die an awful death,'' he...

Michael Schiavo is co-writing a book with author Michael Hirsh to tell his side of the end-of-life case that divided much of the country. Schiavo's wife Terri suffered a brain injury in 1990 that left her in what some doctors called a "persistent vegetative state." She died March 31 after a bitter court battle between her husband and her parents. Hirsh expects the 280-page book, "Terri: the Truth," to be available just before the first anniversary of Terri's death. Dutton Publishing publicity manager Jean Anne Rose confirmed that the company is publishing the book in March. Michael Schiavo's decision to...

I was just dozing off and thought I heard (o FOX) that doctors in NOLA were giving patients lethal doses of morphine?