the illuminator of macon, ga

Can you safely bet your life on what he may think?

Could you be signing your death warrant?

Imagine that while driving on an interstate highway,   the intoxicated driver behind you suddenly thrusts your car into a collidsion with on-coming vehcles.  You are unconscious,  60 years old,  have no medical insurance and the driver is uninsured.  Emergency Room doctors determine that you wil need extensive, expensive surgery, treatment and hospitalization to restore your abilities to independently function.

Hospital staff contacts your family,   They will ask whether you have executed a living will declaring your refusal of  life-sustaining treatment in the event you are unable to speak for yourself.   What verbalized or unspoken factors will influence your physician's and family's decisions -- your age,  your resources for paying for treatment, the predicted quality of your life,  the burdens of caring for you,   or more sinister motives as inheriting your property or collecting your life insurance ?  Will the physician fully disclose treatment options with your relatives,  when he knows that neither you nor they have resources to pay for treatment?

People who fail to ponder these questions when they elect other people to make life or death decisions for them may be playing a lethal game of medical Russian Roulett.  These are among the myriad concerns raised by organizations rallying against liberalization of  right-to-die legislation.

 ECONOMICS AND POLITICS:  "CHOOSING BETWEEN THE DISASTEROUS AND THE UNPALATABLE"

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith's definition of politics is that "It consists  in choosing between the disasterous and the unpalatable".   We have been taught to value human health and life as sacred.   Technological advances  are increasing the length of our lives.
Health care issues, concerning the increasing proportion of elderly and uninsured,  are at the pinnacle of current political debates,

On the other hand,  taxpayers are resisting the mounting burdens of financing healthcare for the indigent.    Health care professionals are wary of becoming defendants in  malpractice lawsuits if they deny life and health sustaining treatment.  Hence, policy makers are caught in a crossfire of  conflicting interests.   Albeit unpalatable , the current solution for balancing these conflicing demands is to "allow" people to "elect" to die.

My position is that older Americans should not be sacrificed for economic and political harmony.   Instead,  healthcare costs should be cut by preserving health,  by reducing incidents  of preventable  deprivation-caused diseases resulting from pervaisive ageism and age barriers to employment.

YOUR RIGHTS TO CONSENT TO EUTHANASIA

The courts extended  the rights of competent people to refuse medical treatment to persons who are unable to speak for themselves.  Required is evidence of the persons' consent.  Acceptable evidence may be in two forms: (1) Living Wills or Advance Directives, whereby competent individuals have left instructions about their refusal of life-sustaining treatment or(2)  Durable Power Of Attorneys,  by designating  an agent, a trusted proxy,  to decide if their lives should  or should not be sustained.

Discordant with the growing moral and legal acceptance of euthanasia are myriad unresolved questions about the voluntariness of these decisions.  Such questions are raised in a June 1996 article by the Ohio Right to Life Organization stating. "A massive push is now under way to ensure that many people with a supposed poor ?qualify of life' ? not only with disabilities that are congenital but also with disabilities caused by illness or injury ? are ?allowed' to die against their will".
 

QUESTIONS ABOUT 'VOLUNTARINESS" AND "QUALITY OF LIFE"  DETERMINATIONS

The presumption that a legal document,  executed by a legally competent person, is in itself proof of the prerequisite informed consent shuts out questions of social or family pressures resulting in a conceived duty to consent.

Also eluded is the validity of consents in cases of misdiagnosed, elderly, sedated, indigent or uninsured patients when healthcare professionals, guided by economic priorities, short circuit discussions of available treatment options by focusing on exaggerated grim prognoses of their patients' conditions.
 

DEAD PEOPLE CAN'T SUE,  BUT THEIR RELATIVES CAN AND DO.

Numerous  malpractice law suits have made hospitals and doctors constantly on guard.
Dead people  can't sue,  but their living relatives are costing hospitals and doctors trillions of dollars in legal fees, settlements, damage awards.  and skyrocketing malpractice insurance premiums.   Conceivably,  doctors can substantially lower their risks of  costly law suits  by tayloring diagnoses to plausibly fit  poor quality of life prognoses --  the required justification for euthanasia.

HOSPITAL AND DOCTORS --  THE PRIME BENEFICIARIES OF LIVING WILLS

At The Medical Center of Central Georgia,  the hospital that serves the poor,  the employee reported that an administrator brings living will forms to patients' rooms and assists them in completing them.   When we consider the probable states of mind of many of  these newly admitted, anxious, sick or injured people,  whose neruological systems may be numbed by sedatives and pain killers,  the opportunities for abuse are frightening.

Health care professionals know that if they euthanize patients in defiance of  their relatives' objections or without consent of the patients,  they would be inviting wrongful death suits, even murder charges.   They must be sure that there can be no provable evidence of disagreement by the patients or among family members.

Doctors, hospital spokespeople, elected officials and judges are unlikely to publically endorse euthanasia as a means of disposing of  indigent patients  or of  covering up physician or hospital staff blunders.   The patients'  consent and legally valid reasons must support these decisions.   In an inestimable number of cases, questions of whether the consents are truly volunatary or whether the justifications reflect purely medical and compassionate concerns may never be answered.

Nevertheless,  armed with euthanasia consents of their patients,  free of  objections from relatives,  errant hospital CEOs  and doctors may comfidently dispatch their liability along with their patients to the morgue -- supposedly in compliance with their patients' wishes.
Indeed we are sliding on an increasingly slippery slope.

SUGGESTED COUNTER MEASURES

1.    The safest courseis to refuse to sign living wills, and to inform as many people as possible when you expect to be or have been admitted to a hospital.    A predictably effective way to handle hospital staff , who bring these forms into patients' rooms,  is to SHOUT  " Go away you are wasting your time,  I  will not consent to being euthanized.".

2.   Demand that your life be preserved and to be availed of all treatment options for restoring abilities to function,  regardless of your ability to pay for them.  Make this
known to as many people as possible,  including your doctor and hospital.

3.  Include your desire that any person or organization that can prove medical malpractice in your case be given standing to sue involved parties in your behalf, whether they are related to you or not.   I would also state the percentage of  monetary awards of your case  to which they would be entitled if  you are alive or dead,