Initiative is, in fact, a terminally bad solution
Letters to the Editor
Jeffrey Golin
Seattle Times, Aug. 22, 2008
Source
I applaud Margaret Dore's piece urging "no" on I-1000, the "Death With Dignity" initiative and the decision by the King County Bar Association to decline to support it.
America's leaders need to responsibly face our long-neglected health-care crisis. I-1000 is the wrong approach, offering cheap, doctor-approved fatal substances to seriously ill and underinsured patients as a substitute for expensive lifesaving treatments. I-1000 teems with perverse incentives.
It is a managed-care, cost-cutter's invention that coerces our caring doctors to undertreat us. Recently, an Oregon woman with lung cancer was notified that the Oregon health-care plan would not cover her treatment, but that it would cover doctor-assisted suicide.
The lethal substances cost less than $100. With this situation, an incentive is created for health-care insurers and HMOs to steer mom or dad to just take the pill and save insurers money.
While its backers tout the suicide option as "voluntary," this guarantee becomes elusive when the unseen gun of looming bankruptcy and foreclosure is pointed at underinsured families' heads.
I-1000 is counterfeit for genuine reform, cloaked in propaganda to resemble humanitarianism.
— Jeffrey Golin, Fremont, Calif.