It’s Faustian – giving a nondisabled or slightly disabled person a chance to deny themselves access to food and water if they become significantly disabled and have resulting functional impairments. End of Life Choices New York, a leading supporter of legalized assisted suicide, has developed an “Advance Directive for Receiving Oral Feeding and Fluids in […]
July 12, 2024 HHS Office of Inspector General – Chief Counsel Division P.O. Box 85200 Austin, Texas 78708 Email: IG_Rules_Comments_Inbox@hhsc.state.tx.us RE: Proposed Regulations published in the June 14, 2024 Texas Register Dear Chief Counsel: Not Dead Yet is a national disability rights organization focused on combatting disability- based healthcare discrimination, particularly in the context of […]
For years, advance medical directives, popularly known as living wills, have been promoted as giving people control over what happens to them at “end of life”, i.e., when they are in dire medical straits. (1) It is hard to disagree with the concept. Certainly, people have the right to refuse treatment they don’t find helpful […]
A friend asked if I knew how many people have been medically killed since Covid-19. My answer is that there is no way to know. We know about Michael Hickson and we’re just learning about Sarah McSweeney and perhaps many others from a recent NPR investigation. However, when relatives agree, or at least don’t vociferously […]
The New York Department of Health recently requested public input from health care providers and patients on how to make advance care planning forms more understandable and easy to use. The Department provided a response template with questions focused on people’s experiences with three forms: the health care proxy, out-of-hospital do not resuscitate order (DNR) […]
Kaiser Health News recently carried an article encouraging people to create videos to help explain what’s in their advance directives, which are often overly complex legal boilerplate or overly simplistic checkbox forms. One thing I like about the article, Straight From The Patient’s Mouth: Videos Can Clearly State Your End-Of-Life Wishes, is the discussion of […]
Below is an article published on Friday, 11/3/17 by Kaiser Health News. The original article can be found at https://khn.org/news/new-instructions-could-let-dementia-patients-refuse-spoon-feeding/ and is republished here, according to the guidelines of Kaiser Health News. A “right to die” organization based in Washington state is pushing a new advanced directive that would allow people with dementia to refuse to be […]
Not Dead Yet and other disability advocates and rehabilitation physicians have worked with Respecting Choices, a national leader in the field of advance care planning, to develop fact sheets on feeding tubes and breathing supports. Today, they announce the results of an over two year collaborative effort. The project began following an open letter from […]
NDY’s comment letter can be summarized as follows: We do not oppose payment to physicians for advance care planning discussions with their patients, but we want the payment regulation delayed until the disability community and others can, with CMS support, develop new advance care planning informational materials that do not rely on “better dead than […]
Thursday, April 16, was National Healthcare Decisions Day. We probably should have made note of it. But then again, we’ve pretty much ignored it since one post I wrote in 2008 making note of the day and NDY’s take on it: In case you missed it, today is National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD). We’re all invited to […]
