A group of local doctors fears that proposed legislation to allow the terminally ill to end their own lives will endanger the public’s health and safety.
Physicians are worried that bills that would give ailing residents the right to request prescriptions for lethal dosages of drugs would slow the progress of end-of-life care, lower the quality of care and potentially open the door to elder abuse. One such proposal, Senate Bill 1129, is scheduled for a hearing Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. before the Commerce, Consumer Protection and Health Committee.
Dr. Craig Nakatsuka, a hospice and palliative care physician with Hawaii’s Partnership for Appropriate &Compassionate Care, described at a Monday news conference scenarios involving two elderly Asian women seeking recommendations of how to end their lives after their children suggested “they had outlived their usefulness.”
“If assisted suicide is legalized in Hawaii, this will be the new norm in society,” he said. “This law would then turn the practice of medicine in this area from healers to killers.”
Advocates of the “death with dignity” bills, including longtime lobbyist John Radcliffe, are hopeful that this will be the year that Hawaii joins six other states that permit residents who are in the final stages of dying the ability to control when, where and how they die. Radcliffe, 74, was diagnosed in 2014 with incurable colon cancer that has spread to his liver.
“To us assisted suicide is killing, and the best antidote to killing is compassionate care,” said Dr. Fernando Ona, adding that doctors often see patients live beyond an expected date of death. In fact, 25 percent of patients nationally are discharged alive from hospice, with most of them no longer needing the service, the doctors said.
Dr. Michael Plumer, medical director of Kauai Hospice, added that the legislation empowers doctors to bring about death to their patients, which goes against a physician’s mission.
“I can say with absolute confidence that it is never, ever necessary to say, ‘Sorry, you’ll just have to kill yourself,’” he said. “The power to take lives has never been a part of medicine as long as there have been doctors. There is no patient whose suffering cannot be relieved.”
What’s more, if insurance companies decide to cover “physician-assisted suicide,” said Dr. Rosalo Paeste, president of the Philippine Medical Association of Hawaii Foundation, patients with terminal conditions such as cancer might not be offered lifesaving treatments as a cost-saving measure.
“The legislative bill will serve to deprive patients of interventions that may help them survive,” he said. “We see no value in evolving the law on this point, only potential irreversible harm, because when you’re dead there is no second chance.”
