By Wesley J. Smith Editor’s note. This is excerpted from a post that appeared at the Weekly Standard and is reposted with permission. …There is still time to excise the Independent Payment Advisory Board from the Affordable Care Act before it is up and running. IPAB’s stated purpose is to contain Medicare costs, a laudable goal. …
Continue reading "Still time to excise the death panels"By Nancy Valko I volunteered to serve on a newly started hospital ethics committees in the 1990s. While I wanted to help analyze difficult cases and serve as a resource for hospital personnel with ethical concerns, I became increasingly alarmed when I saw cost containment and judgments based on “quality of life” brought up as …
Continue reading "Should Ethics Committees be Death Panels?"By Wesley J. Smith When the NHS [the British National Health Service] adopted the “Liverpool Care Pathway” to guarantee quality palliative care, it led to bureaucratic checklist medicine, back door euthanasia, and the terminal sedation dehydration deaths of non-terminally ill patients. It became such a scandal that the LCP had to be scrapped. Now, …
Continue reading "Of the “Death Test” and Death Panels"By Jennifer Popik, JD, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics Editor’s note. This story appeared on page four of the July issue of National Right to Life News. You can read the issue online in its entirety online at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsJuly2014.pdf In a recent Politico Magazine article titled, “Let’s Talk About Death Panels,” Harold Pollack …
Continue reading "They may not be Death Panels, but they are Death Advocates, and they are back"By Jennifer Popik, JD, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics Editor’s note. This appears on page one of the new issue of National right to Life News. You can read the entire 36-page July issue at www.nrlc.org/uploads/NRLNews/NRLNewsJuly2014.pdf In a recent Politico Magazine article titled, “Let’s Talk About Death Panels,” Harold Pollack urges reviving one of …
Continue reading "They may not be Death Panels, but they are Death Advocates, and they are back"By Wesley J. Smith Several weeks ago the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia sponsored a debate–more a discussion–between me and Thaddeus Mason Pope about end of life care under the Affordable Care Act. He supports medical futility. I oppose it. We went from there. I began my presentation with the quote in the headline …
Continue reading "“If Obamacare Dies, Sarah Palin Killed It”"By Wesley J. Smith I think the bioethics left has a bit of an identity crisis going on. On one hand, they decry those who warn against death panels. On the other, they often turn around and say we need death panels. Alexander Pope, a law professor and believer in medical futility, has a …
Continue reading "Bioethicist Pushes Death Panels"By Wesley J. Smith The New York Times uses its op/ed page as a supplement to its editorial page–that is, most of the articles published reflect the views of the editors. Letters to the Editor, too. The NYT has called for health care rationing several times in the past and published articles by others supporting it. It …
Continue reading "More Death Panel Advocacy in NYT"By Wesley Smith I often say that if you want to see where and how society will next go wrong, just look at the articles on ethics and culture currently being published in the world’s top medical and bioethics journals. Latest case in point, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine [NEJM] urging …
Continue reading "Assisted Suicide Proposal: “Death Panels on Steroids”"