If Barbara Coombs Lee, the assisted suicide zealot who heads Compassion and Choices, is for something, run in the other direction as fast as you can! Lately, she has been opining about health care reform over at the Huffington Post—but what is amazing is that she seems to have forgotten things she wrote only a few weeks before.
First, peruse her current column, in which she crazily asserts that opponents of Obamacare don’t want people to be able to decide about their own end-of-life medical treatment options:
Opponents of health care reform are eager to kill legislation and fear is their favorite weapon. Their newest scare tactic, oddly, is the threat that patients will be able to make choices about the end of their lives. For over a decade, Compassion & Choices has been improving care and advocating for patient choice at the end of life (most Americans agree that’s a good thing).
It’s just the opposite. Opponents are worried that people will be denied the choice to receive treatments based on health care rationing, not that people will be able to decide.
Lee then brings up the “mandatory counseling clause” in the House version of Obamacare. She writes:
If Medicare pays doctors to discuss choices with seniors, will doctors coerce them into an early death, as Representative Boehner claims? Only someone with a deep distrust of doctors caring for their patients or seniors choosing for themselves would believe this.
As I have pointed out a bit ago here at SHS, Lee is right that the clause in question doesn’t require people to refuse care. But since the point is cost control, we know which way the tide would generally flow—in much the same way that genetic counseling after a diagnosis that a woman is carrying a Down fetus, often leads to a push for abortion.
But beyond that, who is Lee to accuse anyone else of not trusting doctors? A few weeks ago, again at the HP, she mounted a shrill and categorical attack against physicians, literally accusing them of being so many torturers:
In this country we usually torture people before we allow them to die of whatever is killing them — cancer, emphysema, the multi-organ failure of diabetes or heart disease…Our medical-industrial complex follows a cultural paradigm to do as many things to people near death as is medically possible. Our broken system rewards that paradigm with fee-for-service payments.
Standard routine is to torture those in the process of dying by inflicting upon them a host of toxic chemicals, invasive machinery and painful surgeries. It’s the American way of dying — agonized and prolonged imprisonment in an intensive care unit, pinned down under a maze of tubes and machines, enduring one medical procedure after another, unable to hold or be held by loved ones.
So, when she thinks attacking physicians will further her cause, she attacks, attacks, attacks. But then, turning on a dime, she accuses others of not trusting doctors. Talk about speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
