Health care Reform: Hello Government Directed Euthanasia

Contrary to the President's recent declaration that 'we are not going to pull the plug on Grandma,' the language of HR 3200 would authorize him to do precisely that.

NOTRE DAME (Catholic Online) - The proposed Healthcare Bill has been justly criticized by those who believe in the value of all human life because of its promotion of abortion and the public funding of it. However, the proposed House Bill (HR 3200) casts a much broader and darker shadow of death which is not limited only to the unborn. The most frightening provision in HR 3200 is the authority it grants to the government alone to put an order into a person's permanent medical records which directs the termination of that person's life. Contrary to the President's recent declaration that "we are not going to pull the plug on Grandma," the language of HR 3200 would authorize him to do precisely that.

That life and death authority is found in HR 3200 at pages 425 to 429. Following the Bill's provisions which mandate that Medicare-age persons be subjected to governmental "counseling" regarding end-of-life treatment (page 424, line 20 through 426, line 21), the Bill provides:

"A consultation under this subsection may include the formulation of an order regarding life sustaining treatment or a similar order." (page 429, lines 1-3, emphasis added.)

The Bill then defines the term "order regarding life sustaining treatment" as "an actionable medical order" (page 429, lines 4-7) which is intended to be a permanent part of the patient's records, obeyed by all healthcare providers (page 429, lines 14-16). The order can direct that specified treatments which the Bill calls "interventions" be provided, limited or withdrawn, specifically mentioning the use of antibiotics and the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration. (page 430, lines 4-17)

Consider the impact and meaning of such power. Congress has already directed that the healthcare records of Americans be computerized so that everyone's medical records will be permanently accessible in a government data bank. HR 3200 provides the next step toward the culture of death, which is to require that everyone be issued a government healthcare identity card (page 58, lines 11-13). This will enable any healthcare provider who swipes that card to scrutinize the most personal and private aspects of the patient's life, as well as any "actionable medical order" which had been entered into that patient's records.

Now to consider what the proposed bill does not say. The bill contains no provisions protecting the due process rights of the person targeted by such an order. The bill does not require that the patient be notified of the order or its contents. The bill does not require even that the patient be notified that an order has been entered. The patient is not given the opportunity to object, or the right to appeal, or the right to judicial review, or indeed any rights ordinarily considered to be fundamental due process. So glaring is this omission that one might reasonably speculate that such protective provisions were intentionally omitted to coerce the patient to consent to the end of life provisions proposed by the government in its "consultation" with the patient. The absence of due process protection enables the government to make the patient "an offer he cannot refuse" - either consent to a painless death by euthanasia, or be deprived of medication, food and water and die in pain. If those Chicago-style tactics are deemed too brutal or politically risky or might generate public outrage, the language of the Bill allows the order to be entered secretly so that the subsequent euthanized death of the patient would appear to be by natural causes.

As if the foregoing is not terrifying enough, consider a further horror. Although the language of the proposed Bill which we have considered is specific to persons of Medicare-age, neither the language of the Bill nor logic prohibits these provisions from being extended to apply to the infirm, the disabled, the critically injured, the mentally incompetent, and indeed to anyone whose life does not justify the expense of preserving it. In fact, it could reasonably be argued that for the program to work financially, those provisions must be interpreted to apply to anyone whose continued treatment is not "cost effective."

There can be no doubt that "selective death" will be part and parcel of American healthcare if any of the current proposals for "healthcare reform" become law. All of those proposals are rooted in a "culture of death" which deems it acceptable to terminate life which is burdensome or costly to sustain - a culture exemplified in "the right to choose." The current proposals will extend the "right to choose" to its logical conclusion. The distain for life which now allows a mother to kill the child in her womb because it will interfere with her prosperity also allows the government to similarly dispatch a person whose continued life threatens the government's well-being. As the unborn child is seen as the enemy of its mother because it is an obstacle to her pursuit of happiness, so too the sick, infirm, elderly and disabled are viewed as enemies of the government's financial stability and its progress toward a new, golden age. The President, the drafters of this legislation and the persons who will administer it are all passionate advocates of this culture which denies the intrinsic value of every life. Government-enforced euthanasia will definitely be part of any reform package now under consideration.

But euthanasia will not necessarily be limited to the elderly, weak and infirm. The power to destroy the right to life of one person is the power to destroy the civil liberties of all. Consider the impact on civil liberties of the power that HR 3200 proposes to vest in one branch of the government.

The Bill authorizes government access to anyone's financial records (page 58, lines 5-11; page 59, lines 21-24) and previously privileged tax returns (page 194, line 21 through p. 196, line 2). As we have seen, the Bill would allow government access to one's complete personal and medical history are to know when and where a person seeks medical treatment or fills prescriptions. Finally, it authorizes the government to put into any person's medical records an enforceable order intended to end that person's life. If such power and the existing technology to implement it had been in existence in Germany 75 years ago, there would have been no need for midnight arrests, death camps or holocaust ovens to dispose of enemies of the state. If this legislation ever becomes law in the United States, those deemed to be "enemies of the state" or, in modern parlance, "domestic terrorists" may find themselves suddenly stricken with unexpected heart attacks, strokes or seizures.

The purpose of healthcare is to serve life. This healthcare reform legislation is instead rooted in the culture of death. Because that deadly culture flows through every branch and leaf of it, the current legislation cannot be made right through superficial amendments. This tree is rotten to its roots, and we have been authoritatively instructed that such a tree cannot bear good fruit. This entire legislation must be rejected, root and branch. No Christian worthy of the name can support it.

At our nation's birth, Benjamin Franklin famously said that the people who are willing to trade a little freedom for a little security will ultimately have neither freedom nor security. How right he was.

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Michael V. McIntire is a 1957 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and was later Associate Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School. An Oblate of the Order of St. Benedict and an RCIA Catechist, he has authored several articles on the secularization of Catholic colleges and universities. (From Orthodoxy to Heresy - The Secularization of Catholic Universities, New Oxford Review, Sept. 2008; Has Notre Dame Lost its Catholic Credentials?, St. Austin Review, Sept/October 2007).

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