Absolutely disgusting. I wrote yesterday about a Portland psychiatrist named Stuart Weisberg, M.D., LLC (limited liability corporation), who plans to set up an assisted suicide clinic called euphemistically Dignity House. Apparently, Dr. Big Heart plans to do much more than that. He is going into the business of making people dead by assisted suicide–for a fee–and you get the distinct impression that he will never say no for legally qualified suicidal people. “Services” will apparently even include having your suicide photographed, security–for a fee–flowers–and last meals–for a fee. From his Endoflifeconsultants Website:
Schedule of fees 2010-2012
Office visits to Dr. Weisberg: 2 x 90801 $300 each or 1 x 99245 $500 Medicare patients will never pay more than $30 copays per visit. 90807 $200 per hour for additional counseling. Private insurance can be billed for these visits.
I generally bill as Stuart Weisberg, MD, LLC. My tax ID # is 20-0231539. The billing will, by necessity, be through your mental health coverage.End of Life Camera, LLC: This is a required $600 fee. Fee must be paid by cashier’s check or postal money order at time of receiving prescription for completion of the Death with Dignity Act and reserving your day at the Dignity House…
Dignity House, LLC: This is a required $600 fee. Fee must be paid by cashier’s check or postal money order at time of reservation. Reservations begin on 3 pm day 1 and ends 21 hours later at noon day 2. Electricity, water, waste disposal and other utilities are paid by Dignity House. Laundry machines are on site as is a full kitchen. Noise ordinances apply. Public intoxication is unacceptable and may result in police involvement.
Proprietor: Pending approvalEnd of Life Security, LLC: This is an optional $400 fee to pay for 8 hours of time with a certified security agent. At first, we’ll schedule the hours as follows: 2 pm to 6 pm on check in day and 9 am to 1 pm on check out day…
End of Life Catering, LLC: This is an optional $400 fee. You will receive breakfast, lunch and dinner for 4 at the Dignity House. You get to choose the meals (within reason). Additional meals may be purchased for $25 (breakfast or lunch) or $50 (dinner). At first, we’ll schedule meal times as follows: breakfast about 8 am, lunch at 1130 am followed by check out, and dinner wii be served following check in at 5:30 pm.
End of Life Nursing, LLC: This is an optional $400 fee. This either pays for 8 hours of unskilled nursing assistance or 4 hours of skilled nursing (LPN or RN)
End of Life Media Relations, LLC: This is an optional $400 fee. It pays for 8 hours with a personal assistant who is also a certified beautician.
End of Life Music, LLC: This is an optional $400 fee. It pays for two 100 minute sets during your 21 hour stay. Please, she is a professional pianist for the symphony–no requests and be flexible with the scheduling. I guarantee you it will be magical.
Proprietor: pending approvalEnd of Life Flower and Linen, LLC: This is an optional $400 fee. I suppose it seems self-evident that you wouldn’t want to use rental linens. The flowers come from my wife’s and my garden at home. Full credit to my wife, Heather, for the gardens.
And get this compassionate professionalism:
End of Life Consultants, LLC (optional fee)
Normally, I will not be present for the completion of the Death with Dignity Act. If, however, you would like my therapy dog and me present at the time of death, you may purchase a 3 hour window of our time for $1,200. This is a cashier’s check or postal money order fee. Preferable hours are either 7-10 am or 6-9 pm. I am willing to cut my fee in half to $600 if you purchase the entire package of services. This would make the price of the packaged services $5,000. We work great as a team. I strongly recommend you choose this option. We will make your final journey pleasant and peaceful. Full of beauty and music–we would prefer no television, but if you must…Oh, this option allows you to pay by credit card to my Stuart Weisberg, MD, LLC account.
Proprietor: Stuart Weisberg, MD, LLC
It can take up to 24 hours, and even longer, to die from Oregon style assisted suicide. Dr. Big Heart is selling three hours at $400 per. If you are not dead by that time, tough, I guess. It gives a whole new meaning to, “Well, our time is up.”
This is no different than Dignitas suicide clinic in Switzerland that makes a pile off of assisted suicide, the proprietor of which apparently, is now a millionaire. As they said in The Godfather, it’s not personal. It’s just business. Once something is legal, someone is going to figure out how to make a buck.
June 24th, 2010 | 2:36 pm
There has _got_ to be a way that people can refuse to supply this guy with stuff. The catering for the food, the photography. I don’t think he can be totally self-sufficient, here. It would be good if there could be some cases of people just refusing to sell him things or deal with him in any way.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
June 24th, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Lydia: He has partners for each service, and each apparently has its own LLC. I left their names off of my post but it is on the site.
June 24th, 2010 | 2:41 pm
[...] Oregonian: “A Northwest Portland psychiatrist who the state has reprimanded for wrongly prescribing drugs says he plans to open a facility in the city and charge fees to help patients end their lives under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.” | More from Wesley J. Smith at First Things. [...]
June 24th, 2010 | 2:49 pm
How much for just the dog?
June 24th, 2010 | 3:06 pm
Weisberg is an MD, not a PhD. He practices a trade; he is not a scholar.
This is just good old capitalism. There is a market, Weisberg is meeting the need. We shouldn’t be regulating or interferring with business.
June 24th, 2010 | 4:05 pm
Well, I have to agree with David on this. Entrepreneurship is what made America great. Now all of a sudden the conservatives are objecting. Guess you just can’t please some people.
June 24th, 2010 | 4:10 pm
There should be an outcry about this! If “Death with Dignity” (as it is so deceitfully called) is supposed to be about helping the patient end his or her suffering, then why is the law allowing the “assistants” to gain monetarily from the process? I disagree totally with David’s comment. This is not about business, or at least iot shouldn’t be, and I think we should regulate and intefere with such “business”.
June 24th, 2010 | 4:30 pm
David,
“good old capitalism . . .” I imagine your neighborhood meth dealer and the board of directors of BP are applauding you right now. Government just gets in the way of honest, hard working business owners trying to meet a need.
The problem of having to wait for an uncertain time for the drugs to take effect could be resolved if those busybody regulators would just let the good doctor subcontract with Tony Soprano to have the “patient” whacked. It would be less costly and more time efficient, and I imagine disposal costs would be greatly reduced. Just let the free market do its thing.
June 24th, 2010 | 5:15 pm
“Well, I have to agree with David on this. Entrepreneurship is what made America great. Now all of a sudden the conservatives are objecting. Guess you just can’t please some people.”
May I ask what is particularly “conservative” about objections to suicide? It’s faced very broad opposition even where Christianity is weak.
June 24th, 2010 | 5:29 pm
From the Q&A section of Weisberg’s website:
Q: Is this suicide?
A: I don’t know. In Oregon, we call it Death with Dignity.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
June 24th, 2010 at 5:37 pm
Right. You can call a stink bug a butterfly, but it is still a stink bug.
June 24th, 2010 | 6:23 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys and Lisa, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: Oregon Psychologist Goes Into The Death With Dignity Business–Charges $1200 to Attend Death » Secondhand Smoke http://shar.es/mIvzN [...]
June 24th, 2010 | 7:54 pm
Okay, but the partners have to be getting their materials somewhere. For example, suppose that a food supply company is asked to sell to “End of Life Catering, LLC.” That should set off alarm bells right away, and they should have the right to refuse to do business with them.
June 24th, 2010 | 8:06 pm
I had no idea there were so many socialist- commis on this blog. I guess you shall all have to go to Guantanamo Bay.
Peter S – actually, I’ve heard my neighborhood meth dealers and the BP board of directors are one and the same, and I’m getting a cut of the dividends next month. Furthermore, I’m not so sure it would be cheaper to contract out to hit men; chemical entities (sodium azide, for example) are far, far, far cheaper than human labor. You must be a communist to have such poor business insight.
Sheba Seif,
I have considered that possibility, from a different angle. It may not actually be about business per se. It may be a PR stunt, albeit serious, born out of hunger for notoriety. Who knows.
June 24th, 2010 | 8:22 pm
“I imagine your neighborhood meth dealer and the board of directors of BP are applauding you right now.”
Right. I think I’m going to jump on David’s bandwagon and start dealing crack and my own body. After all, it’s just good capitalism.
June 24th, 2010 | 9:47 pm
I don’t know anything about Oregon law, but if someone dies in California with an unpaid credit card bill, and the estate is insolvent (debts exceed assets) the credit card company can go whistle for its money. Do they turn around and charge the original “merchant”? I don’t know, but probably. This is something Mr. Death should think about before he accepts credit cards.
June 24th, 2010 | 11:37 pm
Well, the good news is that the Oregon Medical Board has suspended Weisberg’s license to practice Psychiatry.
June 25th, 2010 | 10:35 am
Lydia: why would you want to induce other people to withhold products and services from a corporation just because you disagree with its business mission? What are you, some kind of commie social reformer? A REAL American would set up a competing business instead of looking for sneaky, underhanded ways of ruining someone’s livelihood.
June 25th, 2010 | 10:40 am
Kevin: Of course opposition to assisted suicide is a conservative thing. Have you been hiding out in a salt mine somewhere? Cons want nothing more than to regulate other people’s sex lives, reproduction, reading materials, recreational habits and now, most recently, their most personal decisions about continuing to live. Like most zealots they’re somewhat confused and inconsistent, switching between the need for Federal regulation on the one hand and state’s rights on the other — as the spirit moves them.
They also, as a rule, buy into the nonsense that “America is a Christian Nation” and that all the Founders were Christians. Go figure.
June 25th, 2010 | 12:00 pm
HW & David
Is red herring your favorite dinner entree?
June 25th, 2010 | 2:06 pm
HistoryWriter:
A REAL American would probably face his death with actual dignity and live til his natural end. A slightly less REAL American might save a great deal of money by offing himself in the traditional affordable methods. What kind of REAL American makes his living off the pathetic human beings who come to him, too weak to desire to live and too cowardly to end their lives themselves?
June 25th, 2010 | 2:08 pm
And after all, Lydia suggested that the private firms supplying these projects deny to provide the goods and services themselves. Or would you deny the right of companies to choose to whom they sell? What are you, some kind of Communist?
June 26th, 2010 | 1:39 am
Whatever happened to the Hippocratic oath? Or just plain moral decency?
This is not only reprehensible in the sense of “helping” people end their lives, but it also points to a larger issue, of whether medicine should just be another business.
Of course, I can see it now, though. Those arguing that the poor won’t have the same “access to assisted suicide care”, therefore, the government needs to subsidize this for poor people. It’s only faif right?!
God help us.
June 27th, 2010 | 9:28 am
I actually know Stu casually. He’s a regular at a particular coffee shop I go to. He is also a [expletive]. At present his license has been suspended since the announcement of his intention. It’s the second time the medical board has become involved in his practice, apparently.
They’ve accused him of grandiosity and risk taking behaviors, and I guess that’s grounds to be suspended. Stu believes this is because they hate his idea so much.
What he doesn’t get is that it’s actually just him they dislike so very much. To know Stu is to experience ones skin crawling.
July 7th, 2010 | 1:25 am
Bob-nice to know that his demeaner matches his ghoulish intentions.
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