Rick Miller developed trouble breathing and a persistent cough in early 1999, and later learned he had small-cell lung cancer. Among the first words he uttered after receiving his diagnosis, according to his wife, Nora Miller, were, “I’m definitely going to use the Oregon law.”
Mills defended the new law against criticism that physician-assisted dying is immoral. “Some argue that enactment of [the Maine Death with Dignity Act] equates to the government authorizing taking life, or ‘playing God’ with the lives of our citizens,” she said in prepared remarks. Costs of assisted-death drugs have climbed into the thousands Doctors have worked to create affordable alternatives to the barbiturate Seconal, which has become prohibitively expensive, but the cost of assisted death can still be burdensome for those who seek to end their lives.
Seconal’s average price rose from $388 in 2010 to $2,878 in 2016, according to the JAMA Oncology study. And doses after the acquisition could cost as much as $5,000, according to an estimate by the Death with Dignity National Center, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit. “He didn’t want to suffer,” said Vigil Schattinger, 51, a registered nurse and aid-in-dying advocate in Cleveland who sits on the Death with Dignity National Center’s board. “I think he honestly just felt empowered to be able to say, ‘I’ve got this control, and it gives me tremendous peace of mind that I’ve got this option.’”
“It is an evolution,” said David Grube, the national medical director for the end-of-life organization Compassion and Choices, who wrote prescriptions for medical aid in dying from 1999 to 2012. “Doctors and researchers tried to come up with the protocols [that] would be effective, and yet at the same time not take too long and be very easy for the individual to ingest.”
Instead, they had to make the three-and-a-half-hour drive to UCLA’s medical center. “It [was] quite taxing on her, because at that point she was very weak,” Tom Whaley said. “But she wanted it enough that we made that trip.” There’s limited, mixed evidence, meanwhile, on whether assisted dying would cut down on health-care costs. One 1998 New England Journal of Medicine study estimated that legalizing physician-assisted dying among cancer patients receiving conventional care could yield cost savings of about $627 million in 1995 dollars, but noted that would be less than 0.07% of total health-care expenditures.
Source: Law Daily Report (lawdailyreport.net)
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