Assisted Suicide Advocate Slanders Physicians

Assisted suicide advocates will say anything in the cause of transforming suicide into a medical treatment. Barbara Coombs Lee, head of the country’s most influential assisted suicide organization Compassion and Choices (formerly Hemlock Society), writing in the Huffington Post, literally calls physicians torturers. From her piece “Healthcare Reform and the Price of Torture:”

Standard routine is to torture those in the process of dying by inflicting upon them a host of toxic chemicals, invasive machinery and painful surgeries. It’s the American way of dying — agonized and prolonged imprisonment in an intensive care unit, pinned down under a maze of tubes and machines, enduring one medical procedure after another, unable to hold or be held by loved ones.

In this country we usually torture people before we allow them to die of whatever is killing them — cancer, emphysema, the multi-organ failure of diabetes or heart disease. Like the episodes of military torture from which our nation is recovering, medical torture reflects a culture and a set of assumptions. Reform is not about just identifying a few “bad actors” and weeding them out. Our medical-industrial complex follows a cultural paradigm to do as many things to people near death as is medically possible. Our broken system rewards that paradigm with fee-for-service payments.