Update, Jan.5: Obamacare death panels removed after pro-life backlash.
The euthanasia watchdogs at LifeTree.com released disturbing news Friday that the Sebelius-led HHS is reinstating mandatory end-of-life counseling in the implementation of Obamacare.
After the public outcry last summer about such counseling– called ‘pulling the plug on granny‘– the offending section was removed.
Smart observers, conservative and liberal, recognize that government single-payer insurance (like that of Canada and the U.K.) will necessarily search for mechanisms to reduce the number of medically-expensive elderly and disabled.
Such is the preoccupation of the Kansas City-based Center for Practical Bioethics [CPB], headed by Myra Christopher, a Planned Parenthood official advisor whom Sebelius placed on the Kansas state medical Board.
While claiming to be non-partisan activists for autonomy at end of life, CPB raises fears about an uncontrollably growing number of demented elderly and incapacitated individuals held hostage to an unnecessarily prolonged death experience.
CPB has steered the cultural, medical,and insurance engines with their materials called “Caring Conversations.” (Northeast Kansas state representative, Barbara Bollier (R-Mission Hills) brags about her involvement in designing CPB’s Caring Conversations for Young Adults,)
Christopher revealed in 2009 that CPB was covertly shaping Obamacare, and is undoubtedly one of those sources HHS references to defend (p766) their re-introduction of this counseling in the “first annual wellness visit, and subsequent annual wellness visits.”
The new HHS rule requires mandatory counseling about advance directives--regardless of the physician’s inclination to agree to act upon those directives.
Therefore, Obamacare will pay physicians to deliver non-medical counseling (scripted undoubtedly by CPB) even when the directives conflict with the physician’s deeply held professional assessment and/or religious beliefs.
Another related ominous tool, the POLST form–a kind of super DNR order–will be discussed in an upcoming post. LifeTree has excellent info here.
These are very dangerous developments that need your attention.
I was deeply involved with the vain and frantic efforts to save the life of Terri Schindler Schiavo in Florida from 2003 to 2005 when her life was ended in a barbaric and horrificaly painful almost 2 week death by dehydration and starvation as you must know, when her feeding tube was removed………
I refer you to Terri’s Foundation also Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life who was with her and Terri’s family until the end………….
Once a boundary is broken “Thou shall not kill” the slippery slide to euthanasia is assured as borne out by the Nazi Holocaust which began with doctors and in hospitals with the physically or mentally impaired………..17th century Malthusian theory come to the US spawning eugenics and euthanasia, Margaret Sanger, Myra Christopher and the likes……Peter Siinger, HHS Kathleen Sebelius, etc today.
Life is sacred from the very first cell until natural death!