Die fast, save us money

The Washington Post this morning reports that U.S. “Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said this week that encouraging senior citizens to write living wills could dramatically reduce Medicare's skyrocketing health care costs.”

Another step down the slippery slope where the “right to die” would become the “duty to die” and then...

But Secretary Leavitt pulled his foot back.

An HHS spokesperson later said that the Secretary "did not intend to link living wills to the issue of costs."

The idea is not supported by the facts anyway, as the Post reports:

"’I once believed that. It makes sense,’ said Lawrence J. Schneiderman, a professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California at San Diego, who has studied end-of-life issues extensively. ‘When we actually tested it, it didn't’ save money.”

Besides, we might add, it is wrong to encourage people to terminate their own treatment even in part to (in the Secretary’s words) “save the system a remarkable amount of money, allowing that money to be spent in other ways and in other places.”

We must not relax our vigilance in the defense of human life, lest someone in the future decides that government interests would be best served by giving us a push into the arms of death.

As John Donne said, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”