Lee's sentiments, as always, are well meant but his logic is poor. He really does not inderstand how the healthcare system works.
I’ve seen a growing desire in this country to have government take on the role of moral nanny in many ways. The end result of such a movement is undoubtedly a loss of liberty and a loss of our desire to be free adults, fully responsible for our own choices.
I-1000 creates a government intrusion into terminal care that does not exist now and may even make existing practices to help people deal with suffering illegal.
....I-1000 does not cause the insurance companies to do the wrong thing or a relative to lust after your inheritance. But I-1000 does prevent those people from dictating the choices you make at the end of your life. I-1000 ensures that the decision about how you die can be made by you, and no one else. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying about the law or does not understand it.
Leaving Lee's penchant for dismissing others arguments as "lies," he is just wrong here. Under I-1000 an insurance company STILL has the right to refuse to pay for palliative care (relief form pain and suffering). If you offer a person in such a situation a choice between impoverishment, horrible pain, or a $50 suicide cocktail, the level of coersion is frightening.
The unfortunate truth for a libertarian is that one can not provide a suicide mechanism as an alternative to terminal care as long as many people can not afford the terminal care and as long as HMOs stand to profit everytime a terminal care patient chooses to drink the hemlock.
But government should not exist to tell us what decisions we make at an individual level that relate to our own moral compass - unless of course those decisions directly impact the public at large. The opponents of I-1000 are crossing that line - attempting to make choices that should be left up to individuals and their loved ones, without government interference and without having to submit to anyone else’s religious doctrines.
I think Lee is putting lipstick on the pig here. At least for myself, my objections have nothing to do with divinity. They do, however, have to do with morality and I think asking a healthcare provider to choose between profiting form a death and prolonging life is not moral.
I also think Lee is blind to the wording of I-1000. Currently, decisions about how a terminal patient "goes" are made outside og governmental interference by physicians, other healthcare team members, the family, and the patient. These are anything but simple decisions.
And yes, a common issue is whether the relif from suffering is best met by something that accelerates death. Having both helped to make such decisions and been a family member twice as they were made, I really would not want an I-1000 mechanism getting in the way.
Finally, Lee has railed against the current system as being outside the law, he knows perfectly well that there have been no law suits and no pressure against the current practice. Since a large part of the medical community .. including I ... agree with him that patients should have the right to die, he might wonder why so few terminal care physicians have come out for this law? The reason my colleagues give is simple, the law is restrictive.
Leaving Lee aside, as I have a terrible record of petrifying his views, to other proponents and esp. those who feel this is a kind thing to do, imagine yourself at a bedside. A patient is in pain. Their physician, a long term family friend, talks with the patinet and her family. Everyone "read" emotions on each other and on Mom that are very hard to state in legal terms. When does "yes" I want the morphine really mean, "I wante more love?"
A decision is made jointly to let the patient have ad lib morphine ... something that will lead to death. The physician is skilled, everyone understand what is happening.
Perhaps I can provoke a civil discussion by posing a question of how the next steps might occur under I-1000: The patient's son objects saying "we" do not understand what Mom wants. The son says we need an outside consultant and insists on Dr. Palin. What then?
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