HMO Docs Support Assisted Suicide
This is one medical endorsement that I welcome for assisted suicide because it reflects an important truth about the whole movement: It is about money and "treating" the most expensive patients with a lethal overdose. Talk about cost containment!
Lest you doubt it, the California Association of Physicians Groups, self-described as "the nation's largest professional association representing physician groups practicing in the managed care model," that is HMOs, have endorsed assisted suicide. How fitting. And how ironic that left-leaning Assemblywoman Patty Berg and Assemblyman Lloyd Levine would embrace an endorsement by an HMO group--when the Left usually hates HMOs.
Here is the press release about this political faux pas from the California Disability Alliance.
Labels: Assisted Suicide. HMOs
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 6:13 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
I just think the whole medical system is completely effed up. My father received excellent care when getting his operation to remove the cancer in his colon, becuase he is a retired police officer and still has city insurance (and excellent coverage - we pay a huge fee but it was worth it to us), while my best friend's mother received less quality care *at the same bloody hospital my dad went to* because she had limited insurance from her job (she was a medical transcriptionist working out of her home) and she ended up dying of a heart attack about a year ago. All this was right around the same time Daddy was having his operation.
It shouldn't be like that - she should have gotten the same care and quality treatment as Daddy just because she's another human being.
HMOs suck, PPOs suck, most hospitals these days suck, most clinics suck.
And the few that bend over backwards to help the patient are under-staffed, under-paid, and lack some of the more sophisticated available technological resources.
Fak it. The whole medical system needs a bleeding overhaul.
I can't find any information on this news - either at the CAPG website, a Google News search and even a blog search only leads me back to this site and its source.
I'm not at all sure that if it is true, the decision has anything to do with HMO's. Instead, I'd lay any such decision at the foot of the decision that autonomy, rather than beneficence informed by non-maleficence is the trump card of health care ethics. Add in all the calls through the years from some patient's "advocates" for the right of self-determination by self-extermination.
Immediately after that last post, I found a single news release about the CAPG support for the bill, in the Eureka California paper.
The California Association of Physician Groups, which represents thousands of doctors in more than 150 organized medical organizations, is one of the largest of its kind in the nation.
“(Our) members take seriously our principal duty to heal and comfort our patients, as well as to prevent avoidable suffering,” California Association of Physician Groups Medical Director Dr. Wells Shoemaker said. “When physicians can no longer heal the disease or alleviate the symptoms, terminally ill patients have a right to control the circumstances of their death.
“We welcome the fact that physicians and patients have a spectrum of views about this delicate subject, but the insistence upon dignity, comfort and privacy unites nearly every compassionate individual.”
It's odd that a group of docs would agree this way. But I'm not surprised that the words "privacy" and "choice" are used.
The CAPG is an association of Physician Groups, not of Physicians, like the TMA or American Academy of Family Physicians. These are corporations that hire doctors.
I wonder how the Association makes these decisions? Their Public Policy Council met this month, but the Annual meeting is in May.
Perhaps the Council will be overruled by the majority of members at the annual meeting.
This was NOT done with the vote of members. My understanding is that it was a small committee. The same happened with the hospice doctors academy that I wrote about: Their "studied neutrality" was instituted by the board of directors without a polling of the members.
What seems to happen is you get a few assisted suicide proponents in high places and then they decide for everybody else.
Agreed, Wesley. That's why I crash and wangle invitations to the Councils and Committees at the Texas Medical Association and Texas Academy of Family Physicians.
Everyone who pays dues and fees to a professional association or taxes to some government body ought to monitor what they're doing. You can't watch everything, but you can figure out who you trust to watch them for you and get involved with that group.
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