President Josiah Bartlet is just as fictional as the disingenuous arguments actor Martin Sheen is making in those No on I-1000 ads. I’m just just sayin’…
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Hmmm…
and now we learn that John McCain IS really a Russian agent?
Goldy
With all due respect, dissing Martin Sheen is below you. Martin Sheen is an actor and a long term democratic activist. His stand is as principled as that of any other prominent figure. Why is his opinion less valid than anyone elses?
Sheen’s ad does not say that, he raises concerns that it can be misused.
The paper may say this but the facts are that the law is largely unused. No one knows why but one reason may be that most physicians will njto participate.
“depression” is a difficult diagnosis, a diagnosis that few psychiatrists would claim to be able to make under the challenging circumstances surrounding a terminal patient.
The “fact” is true. The law is largely unused so any talk of its misuse NOW makes little sense. The concern, a real concern, that as written the law does give an financial incentives to patients to take this option and to providers to promote suicide.
The facts here are true. However, the letter from her provider was accurate. The provider and the patient DO benefit financially from I-1000 as currently written.
Why shouidn’t a provider tell a patient of the financial advantages of suicide?
This is NOT an answer. Under I-1000 there is a strong financial benefit to providers whenever a terminal patient chooses the death option. Sheen, a LIBERAL, has good reason for concern that this option will be misused against those unable to afford expensive terminal care.
This is NOT an answer. The “lie” here is accurate. Under current law, a physician may not prescribe drugs for the purpose of killing a patient .. by suicide or any other way. A cahnge of this sort is a major change from our medical traditions.
This is NOT an answer. As above, the idea that a “mental evaluation” can distinguish reactive depression from clinical deression is absurd. Who is competent to make such a decision? God? A state appointed psychologist?? A social worker???
As Joe Biden might say this is a three letter word NUTS.
This is NOT an answer. The “Lie” here is correct. As for the 95%, we are talking about 95% of a very small sample of people who have chosen this option. Certainly one can make a law that requires one to inform at least the next of kin. Why not?
Leaving aside the illogic of the resaponse offered by the proponents, I actually agree with this. For me the issues in I-1000 are not the right to choose death but the rights of privacy and protection from what, as a liberal I might call the ultimate death tax impoverishment.
These are an inappropriate responses. For some, suicide is a major moral issue.Indeed for those people, though not for me, that is the crux of this issue. If those are your beliefs, a change in public morality like this IS a major issue.
The best I can say about this claim that someone is lying is that the I-1000 opponents eeem to need a lesson in respect for others opinions, even for those who are religious or employed as actors.
As above, there is no lie here. This is a real issue and I-1000 should have been written t protect patients against this issue.
There is a lie here … that is the lie that anyone has found that suicide is not cheaper than terminal care.
As for coercion, what is the line between telling someone that they can save 50,000 by dying now and coercion? As long as we do not have universal health care, I-1000 is intrinsically coercive.
Newspeak?
The proponents bend the truth. The repr5esentative organization all oppose I-1000. One can be3ieve polls if you want .. some say Barack is losing!
I didn’t dis Martin Sheen. I pointed out that he is just an actor, reading lines, as he did on the West Wing.
3 That’s a load, Goldy, and you know it. For Martin Sheen, who’s a devout Catholic and has never kept it a secret, to be doing this is no more of a surprise than Joel Connelly’s opposition to I1000, and for that matter, that of a lot of left-leaning Catholics, myself included. If someone asked Michael Moore about it, it’s pretty likely he’d be on the same side.
“Disingenuous”? How creative of you to use a euphemism for “lying sack of shit” in the same way the Bushistas used it on Moore four years ago to excoriate him for wiping their noses in their own corruption and hypocrisy.
Our government’s still in the hands of a cadre of fascists out to destroy life as we know it, and they fight really, really dirty. There’s too much at stake in this election cycle for progressives to be chewing each other’s legs off over a comparatively minor issue.
This seems like the beginning of the “now that we’ve beaten the Republicans, it’s time to evict all the Democrats that don’t automatically vote for anything labeled “Progressive”.
I’d better start packing.
I’ve had the “pleasure” of being called a “traitor” by some of my fellow Democrats for any number of positions. They include:
I’m for allowing students to gather for voluntary prayer in non-school-led groups during lunch and break periods.
I’m not opposed to restrictions on late term abortions, as long as there is an exception when there is a risk of serious danger to the mother’s physical health. (Yes, Puddy, I agree that the health of the mother argument has been abused in at least a few cases.)
And this is one more case. Laws against suicide strike me as more than a bit silly, but that isn’t what this law is about.
Mr. Sheen has a religious problem with suicide, and isn’t trying to hide that. Some folks have a problem with morals and religion entering the voting booth, but as my beliefs are a part of who I am, they go with me everywhere. I expect no less of Mr. Sheen. He’s pointing out what he sees as problems with an initiative he disagrees with. Should he remain silent just because some of those arguments stem from his faith?
My own problems with this law, however, are less directly related to my faith, and more related to my distrust of any law that makes it difficult to gather accurate data on its implementation.
For example. In the case of the Oregon law that I-1000 is based upon, the proponents claim that there is no evidence that it is being abused.
The fact that the law was written in such a way as to prevent any such data from being maintained makes that argument disingenuous at best.
Are there “death doctors” ready to prescribe lethal drugs on demand for any reason? I would certainly hope not, but exactly what constitutes “six months to live” anyway?
There is also the argument that this law is written in such a way that forces the patient to make the decision while he or she is still physically capable of implementing it themselves. The option of waiting to the point where a patient can just tell the doctor or a loved one “I’m ready to go now” and have them help is not available here.
Put forward a proposition where there is some way of monitoring implementation and most of the other arguments fall away. Yes, I’d still be concerned about coercion and clinically depressed patients, but would find those arguments less compelling if there were some way of monitoring the situation.
The information doesn’t even need to be available to the general public. Allow for a sealed supplement to the death certificate, along with non-patent-specific data gathering.
But I’m a suspicious type, and tend to think that when someone is trying very hard to hide something, that there is something that they don’t want seen.
This law, as currently written, has too many problems for me to support it, and while it can be argued that the opponents are using emotional arguments against it, the proponents are hardly refraining from making emotional appeals.
And in the end, we still have the proponents of this initiative in the position of trying to prevent the gathering of information about how it is being implemented. That alone should be enough to oppose I-1000.
Bring me a better law, that allows appropriate monitoring, and I’ll support it. But this one not only does not get my support, but I’ll continue to actively oppose it.
I’ll second John here. My own decision to vote against I1000, reached after a fair amount of soul searching, was based partly on my admittedly faith-biased view of the sanctity of human life, but even more so on my fear that by codifying details of the circumstances of death into civil law, we’re establishing a precedent that may lead to less than scrupulous politicians delving into what shouldn’t be their damned business. For the same reason, even though I find abortion generally abhorrent, I strongly oppose its legal prohibition.
John and Arfart
FWIW …
seems to me that issues like this get arbitrarily branded as liberal vs. conservative.
Imagine these slightly different versions of I-1000:
” Healthcare providers may encourage the choice to die if doing so will lower the overall costs of healthcare for the terminally ill.”
or:
Healthcare provided to the terminally ill must include an option for suicide. Patients shall be informed of all consequences of such actions, including effects on inheritance.
or:
Physicians may prescribe suicide as an alternative to patients facing intractable pain, financial loss, humiliating disfigurement, or impoverishment.
Same idea, different wording, maybe this is wording for a conservative “play” on I-1000?
In a sense, our current system does JUST this. It is very common for social workers to “helP” the elderly plan on ways to dispose of their estates so as to be eligible for Medicaid. Wouldn’t an initiative to ban impoverishment be a pre-requisite to I-1000 for liberals?
7 No…but if you were to somehow give me all your money before you shuffle off this mortal coil, I promise I’d find something worthwhile to do with it.
My point is that in the post Atwater/Norquist/Reagan era, we have all come to accept a disingenuous (to use Goldy’s word) argument that whatever issue one side or the other chooses to take up is then “theirs.”
I see nothing intrinsically alike about the following:
I-1000
Medical Marijuana
Gay marriage
Nuclear power and Yucca Mountain
Privacy of communications
Presence of a soul in the conceptus
Prayer in the schools
Right to bear arms
I am a nurse, working at Harborview in Seattle. I also do hospice home care.
This law is not 100% perfect, and I doubt any law ever is. But it is badly, badly needed. There’s a lot of smoke being blown about how it will be abused. This is very unlikely, and after spending 20+ years watching people dying, sometimes quite terribly with unrelievable pain, I very firmly feel this choice needs to be available. Dying in real life is not like a TV drama. It can be gentle and easily managed, or it can be extremely hard. When dying is not going well, people should have the option to create the death they want. The alternative is unmitigated horror and I have seen too much dreadful suffering, in spite of all the pain drugs available, that I will never be able to forget.
If WA cannot manage to pass this or a similar law by the time I retire or am (god forbid) diagnosed with a terminal illness, I plan to move to Oregon so I can make sure I have the tools everybody should have at the end.
The decision to end one’s own unendurable suffering should always be a personal one, and cannot and should not be decided by others who may have different beliefs, opposing political views, or who are innocent of the realities of dying.
SuperRN
This blog tends to run out threads rather quickly, and generate new threads on the topic to continue the debate.
The current discussion on I-1000 is at http://www.horsesass.org/?p=9534.