There is an end-of-life planning booklet now being given out by the Department of Veterans Affairs called “Your Life, Your Choices [PDF file],” or more aptly as some have called it, the “death book for veterans.” The Bush administration had prohibited use of the booklet, but here comes the Obama White House and now it’s being handed out again.
One chilling item is a form called, “What makes your life worth living?” It’s a multiple choice questionnaire with four possible answers:
1. Difficult but acceptable
2. Worth living, but just barely
3. Not worth living
4. Can’t answer now
Here’s a sampling of the questions.
- I can no longer walk but get around in a wheelchair.
- I can no longer get outside—I spend all day at home.
- I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being.
- I live in a nursing home.
- My situation causes severe emotional burden for my family (such as feeling worried or stressed all the time).
- I am a severe financial burden on my family.
- I cannot seem to “shake the blues.”
I cherry-picked the questions because as I see it, these questions have nothing to do with your life being “not worth living.”
Then you have the instructions along with places to sign or initial.
Instructions
- To help others make sense out of your answers, think about the following questions
and be sure to explain your answers to your loved ones and health care providers.- If you checked “worth living, but just barely” for more than one factor, would a combination of these factors make your life “not worth living?” If so, which factors?
- If you checked “not worth living,” does this mean that you would rather die than be kept alive?
- If you checked “can’t answer now,” what information or people do you need to help you decide?
It’s followed with another series of questions, one example:
- I believe that it is acceptable to consider the financial burden of treatment on my loved ones when making health care decisions on my behalf.
Possible answers: Yes, Not Sure, No.
There’s another section that asks, “Feelings about quality of life?” and one of the answers is:
“My life right now is not worth living.”
Regarding assisted suicide:
Q: Can I specify that I want assisted suicide in my directive?
A: No. Assisted suicide is currently illegal. However, even if it becomes legal, the person making the request would have to be competent and able to change their mind at the time of the suicide. Advance directives only go into effect when you are no longer competent to make decisions.
Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online summed it up on Fox over the weekend.
“This goes into the idea that somehow if you’re in a wheelchair, if you’re handicapped, if you’re just too melancholy to contribute to society, well then maybe those are circumstances where you … need to be culled from the tribe. That is the sort of thing that emanates up from this document,” he said.
In other words, we’d really like you to sign all these documents go ahead and pull the plug.
The primary co-author of the booklet is Dr. Robert Pearlman who in 1996 advocated for physician-assisted suicide in Vacco v. Quill before the U.S. Supreme Court and is also a proponent of health-care rationing. Go figure.
Former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives (2002-2006) and founder of the nonprofit Aging with Dignity Jim Towey:
If President Obama is sincere in stating that he is not trying to cut costs by pressuring the disabled to forgo critical care, one good way to show that commitment is to walk two blocks from the Oval Office and pull the plug on “Your Life, Your Choices.” He should make sure in the future that VA decisions are guided by values that treat the lives of our veterans as gifts, not burdens.
Read the booklet yourself, here [PDF file].
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How society treats the least of us, tells a lot about that society.
Unfortunately, the elderly, the young, the physically and mentally disabled are often not treated with the respect they deserve (We all deserve at least a minimal amount of respect). These three parts of our culture are relegated to the back burner because they are not seen by some as viable members of society.
All three groups are viable and all have valuable lessons to teach the rest.
The above is a cut and paste from one of my blog entries. I am appalled at this booklet. I am ashamed that our White House has approved this. How can this happen?
http://mediamatters.org/research/20090824001
The New York Times reported that former Bush administration official H. James Towey criticized the booklet, “Your Life, Your Choices” — which is one of several end-of-life educational materials used by the Veterans Health Administration — for supposedly “seem[ing] to encourage people to ‘hurry up and die,’ ” and being “so fundamentally flawed that the V.A. ought to throw it out.” But the Times did not note that the organization Towey founded is selling its own competing end-of-life booklet, which Towey has reportedly pushed the Veterans Health Administration to buy.