For Immediate Release
On February 7, 2013, Princeton attorney Anne Studholme will testify on behalf of two national disability rights groups in a hearing held by the New Jersey Assembly Health and Senior Services Committee on a proposed bill to legalize assisted suicide. Studholme will be representing Not Dead Yet and ADAPT, which oppose the legislation as a form of discrimination against old, ill and disabled people.
Princeton, NJ (PRWEB) February 07, 2013
On February 7, 2013, Princeton attorney Anne Studholme will testify on behalf of two national disability rights groups in a hearing held by the [New Jersey Assembly Health and Senior Services Committee on a proposed bill to legalize assisted suicide. Studholme will be representing Not Dead Yet and ADAPT, which oppose the legislation.
Assembly bill 3328, entitled the “[New Jersey Death With Dignity Act,” was introduced by Assemblymen John Burzichelli and Timothy Eustace on September 27, 2012 and is patterned after laws passed by ballot referenda in Oregon and Washington states.
Not Dead Yet is described as “a national, grassroots disability rights group that opposes legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia as deadly forms of discrimination against old, ill and disabled people.”
ADAPT is described as “a national grass-roots community that organizes disability rights activists to engage in nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, to assure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to live in freedom.” The group’s primary focus is on expanding Medicaid home care alternatives to nursing facilities. The group garnered national press attention when actor Noah Wiley was arrested with over 100 members for chanting in the Cannon Building rotunda in Washington, D.C. last spring.
Leading proponents of bills to legalize assisted suicide for the terminally ill often claim that the views of disability organizations aren’t relevant. “While it’s true that people with disabilities aren’t usually terminally ill,” said Not Dead Yet president and CEO Diane Coleman, “the terminally ill are almost always disabled. We also live on the front lines of the health care system that serves (and too often underserves) dying people. One might view us as the proverbial ‘canaries in the coal mine’ who are alerting others to dangers we see first.”
Studholme’s testimony will emphasize the disability groups’ charge that assisted suicide legislation discriminates against old, ill and disabled people. According to her testimony:
“Central to the civil rights of people with disabilities is the idea that a disabling condition does not inherently diminish one’s life; rather, surrounding barriers and prejudices do so. In contrast, assisted suicide gives official sanction to the idea that life with a disabling condition is not worth living. It sets up a double standard for how state licensed professionals respond to someone who says they want to die, mandating suicide prevention for one group, authorizing suicide assistance for the other.”Studholme, of the firm Taylor, Colicchio & Studholme, LLP, previously represented Not Dead Yet, ADAPT and other national and New Jersey disability groups in filing a friend of the court brief in the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey in the Betancourt v. Trinitas Hospital case (Docket No. A-3849-08T2). That case involved hospital efforts to withdraw life-sustaining treatment over the objections of the family of a 73-year-old man who did not have an advance directive. The disability groups argued on the side of the family, but the court dismissed the case as moot due to the patient’s death.
“There are important differences between the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, which we support, and doctor prescribed suicide,” said Coleman. “But the Betancourt case involved doctors who wanted to impose the removal of life support over the objections of a family that knew the man’s beliefs. If some doctors will fight in court for the power to overrule the patient and cause their death, how can we talk about making doctors the gatekeepers over a sea change in public policy like assisted suicide?”
For more information, contact:
- Diane Coleman
Not Dead Yet
708-420-0539
- Stephen Drake
Not Dead Yet
585-353-7438###
Please access the original PRWeb press release for pdf version and copy of testimony.
Yes! Assisted Suicide when joining “observation gaming” (for which Medicare is being sued) and unilateral overt and covert “DNR code status” (that is misused to limit treatments that CMS and the private insurers will NOT reimburse to the hospitals/physicians) will mean that the euthanasia of the elderly/disabled by physicians and hospitals for FISCAL expediency will only increase.
The special for-profit interests have gotten together to justify and rationalize the “default” unilateral DNRs as a means to protect their bottom lines and to cover up errors and omissions and OVERTREATMENTS for profit (in the outpatient and inpatient scenario) that are NOT NOW, and for quite some time, being reimbursed by Medicare, and its senior? partners, the huge private insurance industry.
Obviously, this under- the -radar “offing” of the elderly/disabled will be accepted public policy in the not too distant future unless someone with power blows the whistle as to what is going on. But there are a shortage of whistles in the Congress, in the Executive, and of course, the Courts can claim ignorance and “no whistle” because NO UNILATERAL Default DNR cases, covert or overt, have been brought before the Courts, to my knowledge, since the 1991 Patient Self Determination Act was passed by the Congress at the request of Medicare in 1991.
The cases that have gone to the courts have dealt with “self determination” as contested by “medical futility” disagreement and the legality of withholding of life-extending/saving procedures because of “medical futility” that is contested by the patient or the legal surrogate of the patient.
Professor Thadeos Pope, one of the foremost experts and historians on Medical Futility and the Law, indicates that only about 5% of all medical futility disagreements are not solved by the parties involved within the hospital setting.
However, this policy of shortening life for fiscal expediency is just under-the-radar public policy that neither political party wants to take credit for, and Medicare, the Executive, doesn’t want to recognize that their reimbursement protocols have a disparate impact on the elderly whose lives ARE being shortened by the hospitals/physicians to protect THEIR bottom lines.
Obviously, the patients, the elderly/disabled, are not protected by existing laws against unilateral DNR Code Status because there are no mandated “procedural” protections against covert and overt unilateral DNRs being informally (and with no witness) placed in the patients’ hospital charts by physician employees of the hospital as the DEFAULT code status. Quite a conflict of interest when the hospital/hospitalist KNOW that any further treatment of the elderly patient will NOT be reimbursed.
The Hospital rationalizes that DNR is the “default” code status only because the patient hasn’t informed the hospital/physician in a living will or orally (and not witnessed) under State laws ) of the desire to be resuscitated, i.e. to receive CPR and to be in full code status!
This unilateral default DNR code status sure looks like contrived discrimination against the elderly/disabled by hospitals/physicians that was prohibited in the 1991 PSDA. But, of course, the discrimination prohibited in the PSDA is not treated as a civil rights violation and there is no “private right of action” under its provisions that has ever been prosecuted or that has produced case law defining the discrimination that is prohibited in the PSDA. !
While the law implies that “self determination” as to the right to request or reject life-saving and life-extending treatments will be respected and upheld, of course it isn’t and the elderly/disabled are being sacrificed to fiscal expediency, as necessary, and, apparently, with impunity under existing laws that are NOT enforced.
Why doesn’t the main so-called FREE Press get a whistle? Look at the Article in The Kansas City Star, my hometown new3spaper, on the FRONT PAGE of the Saturday, June 1, 2013 edition, entitled “Safety Net’s Finances Improve” which indicates that Medicare potentially saved 700 million dollars because 70,000 fewer old Medicare-eligible patients were “RE-ADMITTED because of complications from previous ailments.” (they must have meant “admissions” –don’t you think?
Makes one wonder how many of those 70,000 elderly/disabled Medicare patients were on observation and/or had DNRs in their charts that cut their lives short sooner than necessary and kept them out of ICU?CCU —-without their informed consent.
Wouldn’t a good reporter wonder about this?