The Bum’s Rush to Die: An All Too Familiar Story

Ben Stein, who I met at a dinner and spoke with about the problems emerging in bioethics, contacted me later to share the terrible experience his family had while his father, the economist Herb Stein, was dying. “They treated him like inventory,” Stein wrote me in a turn of phrase I will never forget. “One way or the other, he had to go.”

Now, the author Pamela Winnick (A Jealous God) has written and given me permission to post what her family is experiencing currently at a hospital on Long Island: “My father, Louis Winnick, is ...85 and has asbestos-related lung cancer, but is still very much himself and awake much of the time, though on all manner of life support (respirator, feeding tubes, etc). The various residents—I call them, collectively, “Dr. Death”—have been chasing my family around insisting we pull the plug. Since when did they move the dial on us? I thought this ‘die with dignity’ thing pertained only to the brain dead. He’s anything but brain dead. He has his family around him and manages, though he can’t talk, to communicate, even laugh, with us. He has never left any instructions or indicated that he wanted life support removed. But they literally chase us. One actually lied (I later caught her in the lie—I’m an attorney, after all). She said my father actually told her he wanted to die. Well, he can’t talk so how would she know? Anyway there was another resident present (also a Dr. Death). He said that my father just didn’t want all the tubes put in. But that’s hardly consent to let him die.

Finally, I found.the best defense. Before they open their mouths I tell them we’re Orthodox Jews, which is kind of funny since my mother is Protestant—and looks it! (My father is secular Jewish) But they do shut up.

This is beyond what I wrote about in my book. Do medical schools teach prospective doctors to chase after families and insist on death? Thank God we’re sophisticated enough to resist them, and very well insured, but imagine if we didn’t speak English or couldn’t pay the hospital bills. I won’t let them get away with this, believe me.”

Winnick and her family are experiencing a trauma that is becoming all too familiar to me based on the many people who reach out for help. As I wrote in Culture of Death: “Unbeknownst to most Americans, a small cadre of influential health care policy makers are working energetically and unceasingly to transform medical practice and the laws of health care away from the ‘do no harm model’ established by the great Greek physician Hippocrates, and toward a stark utilitarian model that would legitimize medical discrimination against the weakest and most vulnerable among us, and in some cases, even their active killing. To make matters worse, the first many people become aware of what is happening to modern medicine is when they or a loved one experience a health care crisis and suddenly come face-to-face with the monster that they did not even know was lurking in their very midst.”

There was a time when the benefits of doubt was given to life. That is being reversed, as appears to be the case with Mr. Winnick. Time for all of us to wake up.