On Feb. 27, the first state to legalize assisted suicide announced that it will start funding suicides for terminally ill poor people under the state’s Medicaid program.
Although Congress last year forbade the use of federal tax dollars for Medicaid assisted suicides, Oregon’s Health Services Commission said that the state would spend its own taxpayers’ monies to cover what it calls a necessary “medical service.”
There was not a hit of irony in the commission’s proceedings. In fact, the commissioners seemed quite pleased at their magnanimity in extending the benefits of assisted suicide to their less-fortunate brethren. “The most discriminatory thing would be not to give this choice to the poor,” said one commission member.
There is no evidence that poor Oregonians are agitating for the “rights” to free help in killing themselves. And the “choice” now offered them by these government officials is not that of access to more effective pain medications and better pastoral care during their dying months.
Despite their lofty claims to be championing the rights of the poor, the Oregon commissioners sounded suspiciously like a claque of managed-care technocrats who think the state would manage better if it didn’t have to care for the poor, especially the poor who are going to die anyway.
Their decision sends an unmistakably sinister message to the poor in Oregon—that the state would rather pay for one lethal dose of medication than for months, possibly years, of costly medical treatments for a poor person who is terminally ill.
Although the commission claims noble intentions, the reality is that Oregon will save millions in health-care costs if it can convince poor people to “choose” death over life.
This horrific equation sets the stage for grotesque budget battles in the future, when politicians may find themselves forcing more and more people to make this “choice” as a “solution” to rising Medicaid costs for end-of-life care.
In other words, what is today called “a choice” for the poor may in the future become something involuntary and coerced.
Even today, many poor families, burdened by financial and emotional pressures of caring for a terminally ill loved one, could be tempted to “choose” the offer of a free lethal injection to end all their sufferings.
In the name of liberty and choice for the poor, Oregon has also trampled on the rights of everyone who believes that assisted suicide is a grave moral and social evil.
By declaring assisted suicide an entitlement and subsidizing it with state monies, Oregon is now forcing every taxpayer to become an accomplice in this evil.
The chairman of the Oregon health commission said that Catholics, the loudest opponents of this scheme, had no right to impose their moral beliefs on their fellow Oregonians.
But with zero tolerance for diversity or disagreement, this Oregon commission has imposed a worldview of its own—a materialist’s creed that sees that poor, the sick, and the handicapped as better off dead.
The “choice” being offered to the poor is no choice at all. It’s more like an ultimatum. The only question now is how long poor families will have the choice to refuse the assisted-suicide “option.”
First published in Our Sunday Visitor (March 15, 1998)
© David Scott, 2009. All rights reserved.
