I wrote August 10 about the now infamous Section 1233 in a House version of the nationalized healthcare plan, which has concerned even healthcare proponents as pushing euthanasia on the elderly.
Kudos to FRC’s The Cloakroom (here and here) for drawing attention to the fact that the 2 authors of Section 1233 are major proponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
The first is Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer. Recall Oregon was the 1st state to legalize physician assisted suicide almost 12 years ago. Blumenauer wrote on Huffington Post July 28:
Rep. Buck McKeon admonished people to read the bill and then specifically cited Section 1233. Actually, I know a little bit about this section because it’s a bill that I wrote which was incorporated into the overall legislation.
Blumenauer wrote an amicus brief in support of assisted suicide in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005, Gonzalez vs. Oregon….
Bluemenauer also links on his website to a 1960 Harper’s magazine article (see right) promoting both voluntary and involuntary euthanasia.
The group Compassion & Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society also says it had a hand in crafting Section 1233, writing July 27:
Compassion & Choices has worked tirelessly with supportive members of congress to include in proposed reform legislation a provision requiring Medicare to cover patient consultation with their doctors about end-of-life choice (section 1233 of House Bill 3200).
Compassion & Choices calls itself part of the “aid-in-dying movement.” About itself Compassion & Choices writes:
… An organization dedicated to care of terminally ill patients, including those seeking a hastened death….
Compassion & Choices… improves care and expands choice at the end of life….
Our professional staff and trained volunteers help thousands of clients each year by… guiding their search for a peaceful, humane death….
We offer information on self-determined dying….
Our team of litigators and legislative experts fights bills that would force patients to endure futile, invasive treatment….
Come again that promotion of euthanasia isn’t part of Section 1233?
Here’s a very lengthy article but well worth the read.
junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/08/no-american-can-ever-say-they-didnt.html
It’s also important to consider that p431 of HR3200 puts advance care planning and any resulting life-sustaining treatment orders and compliance with carrying out those orders on the list of Medicare provider performance measures. The feds wouldn’t monitor compliance if the sessions weren’t expected to take place.
JYW, what’s conspicuously absent is provision that the patient consents to orders written after the counseling session. Or that the orders be written by the patient’s primary care physician.
If I’m incorrect on that, someone please point me to the line number and page of the bill that indicates patient consent is required for life sustaining treatment orders. Or that the patient can verbally override orders after they’re written.
I am goin to repost this excerpt everytime the subject of Obamacare and euthenasia come up.
This excerpt is from an article published in the July 14, 1949 issue of the New England Journal of Medicince. It was written by Leo Alexander, a Boston, Massachusetts Psychiatrist who served as a consultant to the United States Sate Department legal counsel at the Nuremburg Tribunals at the end of World War II.
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Medical science in Nazi Germany collaborated with this Hegelian trend particularly in the following enterprises:
the mass extermination of the chronically sick in the interest of saving “useless” expenses to the community as a whole;
the mass extermination of those considered socially disturbing or racially and ideologically unwanted;
the individual, inconspicuous extermination of those considered disloyal within the ruling group;
and the ruthless use of “human experimental material” for medico-military research.
This paper discusses the origins of these activities, as well as their consequences upon the body social, and the motivation of those participating in them.
Preparatory Propaganda
Even before the Nazis took open charge in Germany, a propaganda barrage was directed against the traditional compassionate nineteenth-century attitudes toward the chronically ill, and for the adoption of a utilitarian, Hegelian point of view. Sterilization and euthanasia of persons with chronic mental illnesses was discussed at a meeting of Bavarian psychiatrists in 1931.[1] By 1936 extermination of the physically or socially unfit was so openly accepted that its practice was mentioned incidentally in an article published in an official German medical journal.[2]
Lay opinion was not neglected in this campaign.
Adults were propagandized by motion pictures, one of which, entitled “I Accuse,” deals entirely with euthanasia. This film depicts the life history of a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis; in it her husband, a doctor, finally kills her to the accompaniment of soft piano music rendered by a sympathetic colleague in an adjoining room.
Acceptance of this ideology was implanted even in the children. A widely used high-school mathematics text, “Mathematics in the Service of National Political Education,”[3] includes problems stated in distorted terms of the cost of caring for and rehabilitating the chronically sick and crippled, the criminal and the insane.”
Euthanasia
The first direct order for euthanasia was issued by Hitler on September 1, 1939,
and an organization was set up to execute the program.
Dr. Karl Brandt headed the medical section, and Phillip Bouhler the administrative section.
All state institutions were required to report
on patients who had been ill five years or more and who were unable to work,
by filling out questionnaires giving name, race, marital status, nationality, next of kin, whether regularly visited and by whom, who bore financial responsibility and so forth.
The decision regarding which patients should be killed was made entirely on the basis of this brief information by expert consultants, most of whom were professors of psychiatry in the key universities.
These consultants never saw the patients themselves.
The thoroughness of their scrutiny can be appraised by the work of on expert, who between November 14 and December 1, 1940,
evaluated 2109 questionnaires.
These questionnaires were collected by a
“Realm’s Work Committee of Institutions for Cure and Care.”[4]
A parallel organization devoted exclusively to the killing of children was known by the similarly euphemistic name of
“Realm’s Committee for Scientific Approach to Severe Illness Due to Heredity and Constitution.”
The “Charitable Transport Company for the Sick”
transported patients to the killing centers, and
the “Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care”
was in charge of collecting the cost of the killings from the relatives,
without, however, informing them what the charges were for;
in the death certificates the cause of death was falsified.
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The house bill as it is now constituted provides for building a health data base of all american and presumably non-americans living in this country.
This bill provides for aquiring bank account numbers of all Americans, ostensibly for collecting fines and health insurance premiums from those contrary few who cannot or will not enroll in the system. The bureaucrats will lable these people as irresponsible and obstinate Obama haters.
When Roosevelt pushed thru social security it was based on 2x amount of people paying in for every for every 1x amount of people drawing on the system.
Because of America’s declining birth rates and a graying population that aforementioned ratio will soon be inverted. If were not for the people who are in this country illegally paying into social security the system would have been ‘tits up’ dead years ago.
In the next 20 years there will be tremendous economic pressure on the younger generations to financially support people who are no longer in their productive years.
The liberal humanists have sufficiently cheapened human life that it will be no big leap for them to go from elective abortion to passive/active euthenasia. And as pbho’s ‘science czar’ has stated he could envision the consititution allowing forced abortion/required reproduction and euthenasia.
As a former liberal democrat Governor Lamb of Colorado said more than ten years ago, ‘Old people have a duty to die and get out of the way.’
Do you think he or his liberal humanist cohorts have moderated their views in the ensuing years or is it more likely they have become more extreme in their statist utopian arrogance?
yor bro ken
“self determined dying” sounds as innocent and good for us as “women’s reproductive health.”
Have to dress it up to sell it.
Dear Jill,
I love your blog. I reference it frequently. Also, it helps me to do the research so I can reference non-pro-life sites for more in-depth debating purposes.
Love, MaryRose
From Corrie Ten Boom’s, ‘The Hiding Place’ (pg 13)
Corrie is writing about her older brother Willem, an ordained minister and college graduate, and his cogent observations about what was going on in the ‘world’:
“Willem saw things, I felt. He knew what was going on in the world.
Often times, indeed, I wished that Willem did not see quite so well, for much that he saw was frightening. A full ten years ago, way back in 1927, Willem had written in his doctoral thesis, done in Germany, that a terrible evil was taking root in the land. Right at the university, he said, seeds were being planted
of a contempt for human life
such as the world had never seen.
The few who had read his paper had laughed.
And so the shadow fell across us that winter afternoon in 1937, but it rested lightly. Nobody dreamed that this tiny clould would grow until it blocked out the sky. And no one dreamed that in this darkness each of us would be called to play a role…”
—————————————————
Corries father and sister died as prisoners of the Germans because they gave aid and comfort to persecuted Jews, when this simple act of kindness was considered a crime by the Nazis and their sympathizers and collaboraters. Corrie survived the concentration camp where her sister died.
yor bro ken
People — pundits and ordinary citizens — are quickly starting to put the pieces together. Last week, they had unfocused rage, but they’re starting to show up at these town halls quoting directly from H.R. 3200, which is exactly what they should do. And independents are starting to take a good hard look not only at H.R. 3200, but also at the Obama administration itself.
I posted some of the pro-life arguments and debates, including reference to the pro-death political and cultural developments in Germany prior to the take over by Hitler and the Nazis, on a major secular website several hours ago. Then I checked in here before preparing to go to bed. Glad to see the above article and comments expanding upon it. We must continue to converse among ourselves. And we must speak in the more secular public square. Frankly, the death culturehas strongly permeated our nation, especially among the liberal elite. Many of them will either deny, make fun of or outright oppose the pro-life position. We must combine researched facts with reasoned passion and continue to be heralds of light in a dark world.
In defining an “order regarding life sustaining treatment” for the purposes of section 1233, the bill states such order “may incorporate any advance directive (as defined in section 1866(f)(3)) if executed by the individual.”
Why may incorporate instead of shall incorporate? Are they saying that it’s discretionary to include a directive? Seems unlikely when the session is designed to offer one. But it does raise the question if a patient executes one whether it’s required to be part of the order.
Why any advance directive if the purpose of this section is to encourage an up-to-date one as part of the consultation? What is it they want to include without naming it precisely?
I looked up 1866f3 and it gives a standard definition of an advance directive. The next line, 1866f4, caught my eye. It states, “For construction relating to this subsection, see section 7 of the Assisted Suicide Funding Restriction Act of 1997 (relating to clarification respecting assisted suicide, euthanasia, and mercy killing)“.
http://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/ssact/title18/1866.htm
Here’s a link for section 7, Clarification With Respect to Advance Directives.
http://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/comp2/F105-012.html
If I understand this, HR3200 would allow for an assisted suicide advance directive (where legal) but costs associated with the suicide are not reimbursed by Medicare. Is that right?
But what about advance care planning sessions? Section 7 would seem to prohibit any provider from being required to participate in a care planning session where assisted suicide is raised as an option. Will Medicare now reimburse providers who participate willingly?
Isn’t it important that the final version of the bill states clearly that patient participation is voluntary and that patients be advised in advance of the topics to be covered so they can give informed consent?
One of the things that no one seems to be talking about is the fact that what conditions a person, while he/she is healthy, believes he/she could not live with are likely to change when that person becomes sick. The movie “Almost Heaven” made this point in humorous way — the protagonist, who is in a coma after a car accident, finds herself haunting a person like a ghost when the hospital is planning to take her off life support FOLLOWING HER DIRECTIVE, one that all the young doctors sign because it is cheaper for the hospital and they don’t really think about it. Her family is going to okay the decision because it was her wish. How many of us know people who think they would not want to live if they couldn’t walk, or if they were in pain? How many of them change their minds when it actually happens, or after they have had time to get used to living in that way? When family and doctors look at the old directive, how do they determine when the patient was thinking clearly and knew what he/she wanted?
When did we stop believing that mentally healthy people almost always want to live?
MaryRose, 7:59p: Thanks! Keep coming back!
kbhvac, 8:02p: “The Hiding Place” is one of my favorite all time books, very inspiring.
Thanks for posting this information. It is a real eye-opener.
Sarah Palin has also posted a persuasive defense of her “death panels” comment which can be found here along with a link to your post:
http://allhands-ondeck.blogspot.com/2009/08/palin-defends-death-panel-comment.html
Jill,
As long as you’re writing about Truth, I’ll be reading it! XD
After you, Barbara!