This is the newspaper’s mini-bio for Mike Reynolds:
Michael Reynolds of Lewiston is a writer and Web designer for Ability Maine, a disability rights website funded by Resources Organizing for Social Change, a nonprofit based in Monroe. He is a long-time activist and was born with cerebral palsy.
To add to that – Mike has been a long-time friend and supporter of NDY. He’s a filmmaker who produced the memorable Million Dollar Bigot.
On Sunday, April 28, the Lewiston Sun Journal published on op-ed by Mike – summarizing some current attempts to legalize euthanasia and the historic fails of those attempts in New England in his essay titled “Bill allowing doctor-assisted suicide has troubling aspects.”:
More than a decade ago, the people of Maine soundly defeated a referendum regarding assisted suicide. Last year, the residents of Massachusetts also defeated legislation that would have legalized assisted suicide. Bills in Connecticut and Vermont were killed earlier in the year in those state legislatures.
Despite that overwhelming opposition to assisted suicide, Rep. Joseph Brooks, U-Winterport, has introduced LD 1065, “An act regarding patient care at the end of life” in the Maine Legislature, with a hearing scheduled for April 29.
The bill has many aspects that are troubling.
Unlike the assisted suicide law in Oregon, which has questionable safeguards in place — namely that two doctors need to agree with the terminal diagnosis — the proposed law by Rep. Brooks requires only “the opinion of one doctor,” and terminal diagnosis means only a limited life expectancy, saying nothing about whether that means six days, six months, or six years.
(Note – the Vermont bill has been resurrected and is ready to be debated and voted on in the House this week.)
Please read the rest of Mike Reynold’s essay here.
Yes! Assisted Suicide laws will further endanger the elderly and disabled because these laws will open the door even further to euthanasia of the elderly and disabled for fiscal expediency.
No matter how many protections in these laws, it is still impossible to prevent abuse or circumvention of the “intent” of the law. Any patient facing a terminal illness can volunteer to stop eating and drinking and to ELECT to go on Hospice —and they will die soon enough. This is NOW legal. Why is it necessary to give physicians the power to prescribe LETHAL doses that will kill patients almost immediately? While most physicians and families(surrogates) would not be corrupted by Assisted Suicide Laws, there would or could be abuse for personal gain and fiscal expediency that possibly wouldn’t even be discovered
Who would have ever dreamed that the 1991 Patient Self Determination Act would open the door to unilateral overt and covert DNRs, the purpose of which is to cap unreimbursed treatments? Who would have ever dreamed that the 1991 PSDA would be ineffective and open the door to removing CHOICE of the patient to LIVE –and YET not effectively mandate in the PSDA the right of the patient to make the CHOICE to DIE even if the life-extending treatment isn’t considered medically futile under some due process procedure.
The failure of the Congress in 1991 to place physicians and for-profit clinics under the provisions of the 1991 PSDA has permitted physicians to over-treat for profit up to the Diagnosis Group Caps and to under-treat for profit (shorten life) when CMS and the private insurers refuse reimbursement.
But, of course, the AMA and the private clinics lobbied not to be put under the provisions of the 1991 PSDA, which would have required them to SEEK informed consent for one of the two legal standards of care that Medicare will reimburse –i.e. Curative Care or Comfort/Hospice Care. Comfort/Hospice Care is a standard of care that is cheaper to deliver and that was intended to prevent elderly/disabled, dying patients from dying in the ICUs and CCUs of of our nation’s Acute Care Hospitals.
Professor Thaddeos Pope, the foremost expert on Medical Futility and the Law, has indicated that there are many States who have recently passed new laws to protect their elderly and disabled from unilateral DNRs that shorten life because some third party thinks the quality of the life is not worth saving. But, of course, what about the majority of states who have not passed new laws to protect their elderly and disabled from the (disparate) discimination created by CMS Reimbursement protocols that to a great extent are a direct response to the problem of overtreatment of patients for profit.
I agree with Mike Reynolds’ essay! This is a dangerous bill that should be defeated in the interests of protecting the elderly and disabled.