Dear Catherine,
I enjoyed your appearance on Coast last night. It was a very insightful discussion as always. You will be shocked and saddened by the following, but I implore you to read on.
You talked a bit about people’s fear of the implications of the end of life counseling session that is part of the Obama health care plan. This would take us one step closer to the legalization of the outright murder of the old and infirm. The first step was the Hospital Futility Policy (HFP). Every hospital and hospice in the nation has one. The HFP states that anyone who is unable to feed him or herself may be allowed to die. This policy is being used as an excuse to starve (torture) to death those whom, for whatever reason, such as being in a drug induced stupor, aren’t able to alert others that food and water are being withheld, even though, in many cases, they are fully capable of feeding themselves.
One example is my beloved mother, who broke her hip and wasn’t given food for three days before they finally did the surgery. It was three days after the surgery when I visited her and noticed that the meal cart was passing her by. My brother had to literally plead with her doctor to start feeding her, so they reluctantly gave her intravenous nourishment until she was able to eat solid food. My mother was always fully capable of feeding herself and did so until the day she died four years later at age 90.
One of my friends, a registered nurse, had a similar experience. A friend of hers who had cancer was starved to death in a hospice in California. She quit her nursing job because of it. Neither of the above cases had anything to do with using extraordinary measures to sustain life. We need to ask ourselves, “What kind of a health care system do we have when simply providing food and water is often considered to be a ‘futile treatment'”?
This is a very disturbing, widespread problem. You can easily verify this by clicking on the following links:
Hospital “Futile Care” Policies- Deciding Who Should Die
Google Search (Hospital Futility Policy Citizen)
An excellent article on this subject is “A Duty to Die?” by Karla Dial (Citizen Magazine, January, 2004). Regrettably, it’s no longer available online, but I’ll see if I can get permission to send you a copy.
This issue is of grave importance to us all. Thank you, Catherine, for taking the time to read about it.
Sincerely,
R.G
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*RG has graciously given us permission to publish his important letter.