http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/opinion/07douthat.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

Interesting piece on the business of physician assisted suicide.

Consider the words of a prominent oncologist, bioethicist and health care wonk, critiquing assisted suicide in 1997, just before a Supreme Court ruling on the issue. “Once legalized,” this writer warned in the pages of The Atlantic, “euthanasia would become routine. Over time doctors would become comfortable giving injections to end life and Americans would become comfortable having euthanasia as an option.” From there, it would be an easy slide to euthanizing the incompetent: “Comfort would make us want to extend the option to others who, in society’s view, are suffering and leading purposeless lives.”

Comfort — and budgetary constraints. Euthanasia would be much more likely to pass from an exception to a rule, the bioethicist argued, “in the context of demographic and budgetary pressures on Social Security and Medicare as the Baby Boom generation begins to retire, around 2010.”

In the great health care debate of 2009, that’s the kind of argument you’d expect to hear from a Republican politician. But the words were actually written by Ezekiel Emanuel, a health-care advisor at the Office of Management and Budget, and the brother of Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff.

Ironically, Dr. Emanuel now stands accused of favoring some sort of death panels himself, thanks in part to a paper he recently co-authored, which argues that the scarcest medical resources (emergency vaccines, say, or donated organs) should be provided to younger, healthier patients before they’re given to the aged and infirm. His critics have seized on the paper to suggest that Emanuel — and by extension, the Obama administration — might support applying age and health-based rationing to medical treatment in general.

Yet the conservatives pillorying him, unjustly , as a “deadly doctor” could just as easily be quoting him. Twelve years later, Emanuel’s Atlantic essay remains a lucid case for the existence of a slippery slope, especially under government-managed health care, to some sort of death-by-bureaucrat.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K