Are you covered?
The question doesn’t refer to insurance of the standard variety.
Two of my bioethics friends have converged on the dire need to stay current on the changing terms for ending your life. Nancy Valko sent along Wesley J. Smith’s blog post on all the ways the ‘right to die’ is quickly becoming the duty to die.
Here’s the note she wrote first:
This weekend I spoke on end-of-life issues at a wonderful conference in Raleigh, NC. As usual, I was asked if people should sign “living wills” to protect themselves. I told them that “living wills”, durable powers of attorney, etc. could not definitely protect anybody and the reason was that the increasingly popular futility policies and/or laws could overturn anything. I likened it to Henry Ford’s alleged statement about the Model T that people could order any color they wanted as long as it was black. So too, the “right to die” movement was never really about choice. It was always about getting people dead. This article proves the point.
The legislative process has become so overwhelming, that unless one hires a professional lobbying group to keep track, laws can pass quietly without any public attention at all.
That seems to be the case in Idaho, where the Senate has passed a Texas-style futile care bill. The bill is so bad, it permits doctors who want to refuse wanted treatment to violate a patient’s written advance directive.
Wesley parses the bill, and it’s must reading. This kind of ‘ethics’ sea change is spreading rapidly, though most people are unaware.
This idea of “prolonging the dying,” used to be called extending life. If that is what the patient wants, it is the quintessential purpose of medicine! If this section of the bill is found to apply to the futile care portion of the proposal, imagine the possibilities to force the most weak and vulnerable out of the lifeboat.
