California HealthCare Foundation’s Important Report on End-of-Life Care

The California HealthCare Foundation has issued an important report revealing that minorities receive much less effective end-of-life and palliative care than do whites. This study is important in its own right, but let us contemplate what it means in the context of A.B. 374, the bill that would legalize assisted suicide in California. (It’s a long report, which can be linked here.) Here is just a sampling of the Foundation’s troubling findings:

- Ethnically diverse populations are significantly less likely to use hospice care than whites. In 2004, for example, of those who died while receiving hospice services, only 4% were Asian American, 6% were African American, and 15% were Latino, contrasted with 74% who were white.
- While the majority of Californians die in hospitals and nursing homes, few of the state’s hospitals—and even fewer skilled nursing facilities—offer organized palliative care services, according to the report. (Palliative care is the term for providing care for symptom relief and improved quality of life, rather than care aimed at a cure. Palliative care can be provided simultaneously with curative treatment.) Regarding other palliative care issues, the report found:
- The under treatment of pain is prevalent among the elderly, poor, and racial and ethnic minorities.
- Recent legislation requiring palliative care training for physicians in order to renew their medical licenses did not address cultural sensitivity even though many may lack those skills.

The relevance to this report to the advisability of legalizing assisted suicide is self evident. But don’t expect the media to connect the dots since for most reporters “choice” and the fact that some opponents of assisted suicide are religious conservatives is the story line on this issue. It will thus be up to opponents of A.B. 374 to get Democrat legislators who represent minority districts to come to grips with the importance of this report, and understand how the context of unequal deliveryof care makes legalized assisted suicide acutely dangerous to their constituents.

HT: Ross S. Heckmann