"I know I’m vulnerable because I’m almost 90. I would not go to the hospital under any circumstances."

Said Shatzi Weisberger, 89, a retired nurse, quoted in "At 89, She Fears Dying Alone More Than the Coronavirus Itself/She wants to be surrounded by loved ones when she dies. Not intubated and isolated in a hospital" (NYT).

[Weisberger] did not want to die alone in her apartment. But if she went to the hospital, she was afraid that she would get the coronavirus there and die among strangers, cut off from the people she cared about....

Ms. Weisberger had long ago planned for her end of life: a friend had promised to sit with her in her last days; an acupuncturist would ease any pain; when it was over, an undertaker would ice her body until burial. Alone in her apartment [one night when she felt symptoms of a heart attack], with the city mostly locked down, she realized that whatever happened to her in the next days or months, she would likely face it alone.

“It’s going to be horrible not being able to get out of bed to go to the toilet or get food,” she said.

Why does a retired nurse, a medical professional, hate hospitals so much? And why does she look to an acupuncturist to "ease any pain"? (The key word is "ease" not "any.")

The answer, I'd say, isn't that nurses in general reject professional medical care, it's that the NYT chose to quote this particular rejecter of medical care because she happens to have been a nurse.

I experience this NYT article as part of the "death panels" agenda — getting old people to accept their fate and go down easy.

"Death" framing worked so well for Republicans, so Hillary Clinton tries to deploy it for the Democratic side.

Oh, Hillary. It seems so sad. She attempts a tweet:

Forget death panels. If Republicans pass this bill, they’re the death party.

Will DEATH!!!! work as a political message?

The Republicans famously, successfully used "death" to reframe political issues: death tax, death panels. But those were more precise issues that really had to do with death. "Death tax" was a reframing of "estate tax," and "death panels" had to do with end-of-life medical decisionmaking.

"Death party" asks us to believe the Republican Party is happy to let us die.

I would think that crudely shouting DEATH!!!! would cause many people to turn away from the whole discussion. And for many others — especially people facing life-threatening conditions or with family members who are dying or have died — the harping on death causes pain and anxiety.

Is this the right way to try to talk to people?

"Neil Gorsuch wrote the book on assisted suicide. Here’s what he said."

Writes Derek Hawkins in The Washington Post.

In 2006, the year he was nominated to the federal bench, he released a heavily-researched book on the subject titled “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.”... In it, Gorsuch reveals that he firmly opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia, and argues against death with dignity laws, which currently exist in just five states. His reasons, he writes, are rooted in his belief in an “inviolability” of human life.

“All human beings are intrinsically valuable,” he writes in the book, “and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

You see the connection to arguments for abortion rights. I'm interested to see at how Gorsuch opponents avoid getting tangled up in... death.

[I]n the early 2000s... Gorsuch attended Oxford University [and] studied legal and moral issues related to assisted suicide and euthanasia under the Australian legal scholar John Finnis, a staunch opponent of aid-in-dying measures....

[In his 300-page book, Gorsuch] touches on everything from Greek and Roman laws on taking one’s own life to present-day arguments in support of aid-in-dying legislation.... [He] seems to have been alarmed by the sudden proliferation in the mid-1990s and early-2000s of proposals seeking to legalize physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. He also cites the flurry of articles, books and defenses that emerged after the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian made headlines in 1990 for helping an Alzheimer’s patient kill herself. One particular work that seemed to bother him was Final Exit, a popular book by the right-to-die organization the Hemlock Society that describes various methods of “self-deliverance,” including suicide by plastic bag and firearm.

Some of Gorsuch’s sharpest criticisms were directed at one of his fellow jurists, Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Posner has written in favor of permitting physician-assisted suicide, arguing that the government should not interfere with a person’s decision to take his or her own life, especially in cases where the patient is terminally ill.

Gorsuch rejected that view, writing it would “tend toward, if not require, the legalization not only of assisted suicide and euthanasia, but of any act of consensual homicide.” Posner’s position, he writes, would allow “sadomasochist killings” and “mass suicide pacts,” as well as duels, illicit drug use, organ sales and the “sale of one’s own life.”

Gorsuch concludes his book by envisioning a legal system that allows for terminally ill patients to refuse treatments that would extend their lives, while stopping short of permitting intentional killing.

So, Gorsuch is distinctly not a libertarian. I'm putting the book in my Kindle, because I want to look more closely how he connects abortion to suicide. I've taught the abortion and assisted suicide cases for many years, and what's always seemed importantly different about assisted suicide is the problem that a few years back got labeled "death panels." It's one thing for an individual woman to decide to decline to devote her own body to the gestation of a new individual and for courts to deprive the group of the power to force her to do it. It's quite another to empower the group to deliver death to an individual who is suffering at the end of life when the group is in a position to benefit emotionally and financially from ridding itself of this needy and vulnerable person. 

AND: I do realize that I have a lot of readers who are about to tell me that it's not quite another thing, it's the same thing. I do understand the way in which the 2 things are the same. I am highlighting the way they are different.

"How doctors want to die is different than most people."

More death-panelistic propaganda. This one's from CNN.

"For someone who is dying, the past can be too complicated to contemplate and the future is jarringly unknown."

"Focusing on the present, Zen Hospice Project believes, is where the potential for living most meaningfully — even while dying — exists."

Walk through the front door of the Guest House, as the project’s rambling Victorian home is known, and smell the strong coffee brewing or the homemade chocolate cookies cooling in the kitchen. The cookies aren’t just a nicety. According to Dr. B.J. Miller, the organization’s executive director, piquing the senses is a key strategy to dying well. “No future necessary when you’re in the moment,” he says.

Another death-panelistic article in The New York Times, this one's called "Zen and the Art of Dying Well."

This place sounds exactly like the place that freaked out Frank Gallagher on "Shameless." What episode was that? Anyone know what I'm talking about?

"What is Alphabet? Alphabet is mostly a collection of companies. The largest of which, of course, is Google."

"This newer Google is a bit slimmed down, with the companies that are pretty far afield of our main Internet products contained in Alphabet instead. What do we mean by far afield? Good examples are our health efforts: Life Sciences (that works on the glucose-sensing contact lens), and Calico (focused on longevity).  Fundamentally, we believe this allows us more management scale, as we can run things independently that aren’t very related. Alphabet is about businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed."

Enthuses Larry Page.

The link on Calico goes to: 

We’re tackling aging, one of life’s greatest mysteries.

Calico is a research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan. We will use that knowledge to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives. Executing on this mission will require an unprecedented level of interdisciplinary effort and a long-term focus for which funding is already in place.

Interesting word selection, Executing. This better not be the death panels sneaking in. Buzzphrases to watch out for: 1. controlling lifespan, 2. longer and healthier. You may look at "longer and healthier" and focus on longer, but I see longer linked to healthier and feel that there is some unknown algorithm wherein the desirability of length relates to a degree of healthiness. 



Don't let your enthusiasm outrun your skepticism.

The Supreme Court saves the lethal injection and Justice Breyer dissents demanding the complete abolition of the death penalty.

After last week, perhaps (some) conservatives will feel better knowing it's still possible to execute criminals in the United States.

The case is Glossip v. Gross (PDF). The Alito majority rejects the challenge to the 3-drug protocol. An argument was made that the first drug perhaps only immobilized the condemned person and did not prevent the sensation of pain, but an insufficient showing was made. Alito ended with a shot at the dissent:

Finally, we find it appropriate to respond to the principal dissent’s groundless suggestion that our decision is tantamount to allowing prisoners to be “drawn and quartered, slowly tortured to death, or actually burned at the stake.” That is simply not true, and the principal dissent’s resort to this outlandish rhetoric reveals the weakness of its legal arguments.

Justice Thomas's concurring opinion describes the most horrific murders. This graphic presentation is offered in refutation of "Justice Breyer’s assertion... that the death penalty in this country has fallen short of the aspiration that capital punishment be reserved for the 'worst of the worst.'"

... Justice Breyer explains that his experience on the Court has shown him “discrepancies for which [he] can find no rational explanations.” Why, he asks, did one man receive death for a single-victim murder, while another received life for murdering a young mother and nearly killing her infant? The outcomes in those two cases may not be morally compelled, but there was certainly a rational explanation for them: The first man, who had previously confessed to another murder, killed a disabled man who had offered him a place to stay for the night... The killer stabbed his victim’s throat and prevented him from seeking medical attention until he bled to death. The second man expressed remorse for his crimes and claimed to suffer from mental disorders.

ADDED: There's some more material in a later post, here. Also, I note that Breyer stops short of declaring that the death penalty violates the Constitution. He only says it's "highly likely" that it does and that the Court should call for a full briefing on the subject.

Prepare to become adequately informed.

"Patients are not adequately informed about the burdens. All they’re told is, ‘You have to go on dialysis or you’ll die,’... Nobody tells them, ‘You could have up to two years without the treatment, without the discomfort, with greater independence.’”

Said Dr. Alvin H. Moss, chairman of the Coalition for Supportive Care of Kidney Patients, quoted in "Learning to Say No to Dialysis."

Do older people with advancing kidney disease really intend to sign up for all this? If they hope to reach a particular milestone — a great-grandchild’s birth, say — or value survival above all, perhaps so. But many express ambivalence....

[O]lder patients may not fully grasp what lies ahead. When they decide to discontinue dialysis, Dr. Moss said, “patients say to me, ‘Doc, it’s not that I want to die, but I don’t want to keep living like this.’”

Oh, you "older people," you need to learn... and the death panel coalition is here to propagandize adequately inform you.

In Belgium, doctors — following the law — kill depressed patients who want to die.

(Via Live Action News, which says: "A new PBS documentary glowingly features euthanasia in Belgium [and] will send chills down the spine of any sane person who watches it.")

IN THE COMMENTS: Richard Dolan said:

So, this is what life-and-death looks like when it's reduced to bureaucratic, form-shuffling banality. Not pretty.

The Supreme Court will decide on the 3-drug protocol for lethal-injection executions.

SCOTUSblog reports.

Q: "If there are fewer elderly people, particularly poor elderly people, wouldn't that save a ton of money too?... And do you understand the dangerous implications of going down this path?"

A: I have no philosophy of abortion. I have no philosophy of end-of-life care.... My job as an economist is to deliver the empirical facts so that you all can make the necessary decisions."

"All that drama!... I cannot understand why you do it."

Says Death in the Ted Hughes translation of the Euripides' play "Alcestis." Death is talking to Apollo about us humans:

As far as I am concerned, their birth-cry
Is the first cry of the fatally injured.
The rest is you — and your morphine.
That is what they call you the god of healing.
Life is your hospital and you call it a funfair.
Your silly sickroom screen of giggling faces,
Your quiverful of hypodermic syringes
That you call arrows of inspiration.

We went out to see that play yesterday in Spring Green, which looked like this:



The light through the reddish grass was lovely, but this wasn't one of the outdoor plays. We were indoors for this play...



... which is about a queen, Alcestis, who gives her life so that the king, Admetus, can live, in some deal that makes sense to the gods. Alcestis is the least interesting character in the play that gets her name, since it's established at the get-go that she's going to die, and she does exactly that early on. She's mostly talked about.

In fact, in the end, when — spoiler alert — Heracles brings her back from the dead, she's incapable of speaking for the first 3 days of resurrected life, and the play ends before that happens, so we never hear from her again. My favorite character was the king's father, who, we learn at the outset, refused to give his own life for his son's. The son is outraged that this old corpse of a man — as he sees it — clings to the meaningless shred of life he's got left. When the old man finally speaks for himself, he says just that: It's all he's got left.

Driving back home, (ad)Meade(us) and I talked about the play, and the phrase "death panels" came up. The son thought it was selfish and disgusting that his elderly father and mother wouldn't die. Quite apart from his need to have someone die for him, he had contempt for their attachment to worthless life. Of course, Death, quoted at the top of this post, thought all of life was agonizing drama, and the newborn baby's cry was crying at the fatal injury that is birth. All of life is a hospital, and you call it a funfair.

Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel dead at 75.

He hopes.

Reliving the Terri Schiavo case.

A 13-minute video — and an article — at the NYT today:


Why revisit this controversy now? Scanning the 13-paragraph article for an answer to my question, I find the NYT variation on my question in Paragraph 7: "What, if anything, is the enduring legacy of this painful episode?" In the middle of the next paragraph, I find a key:

[W]hen she was in the news almost daily, there was a discernible increase in the number of Americans who prepared living wills and comparable directives, according to groups like Aging With Dignity, a nonprofit organization that supports end-of-life wishes.

The Terri Schiavo case was effective, like nothing else we've seen recently, in pushing people to sign those documents that will enable medical personnel to shunt them beyond that resource-consuming hospital bed. In these days of aging Baby Boomers and awareness of how we're all paying for everybody else's medical care, there's a growing interest in attaching "living wills and comparable directives" to all the pre-corpses of America.

Perhaps some politicians have learned a lesson: that these life-or-death decisions are probably best left to families and, should irreconcilable differences surface, to the courts....

Yeah, "perhaps"! I notice the phrase "death panels" does not appear in the article. There isn't even a mention of the Affordable Care Act and the recent congressional foray into the field of health care. The Act made it through Congress on the narrowest possible margin and it nearly died over the question of facilitating death.

And here's a second key to why the NYT is revisiting Terri Schiavo now:

Larger questions remain, affecting an estimated 25,000 Americans deemed by doctors to be in a vegetative state. Complicating matters are studies like those reported last week by a team in Belgium and earlier by Adrian M. Owen, a British neuroscientist working in Canada. They have found through brain-imaging techniques that residual cognitive capacity may exist in some people classified as vegetative.

That's phrased awfully delicately, don't you think? What if people start to disbelieve the story that Terri Schiavo was an unburied corpse, with a liquefied brain, tended over by sentimental parents who resisted the straightforward facts delivered by doctors? What if the scientific consensus breaks down because of actual science and we learn that those 25,000 Americans are still in there, longing — some of them anyway — to return to this life? What are we willing to spend to try to bring them back?

If everyone would sign the relevant documents before entering this state, the rest of us will not be asked these questions, because the assumption will be that whatever longing persists in the persistently vegetative is longing for death.

By the way, the NYT article begins and ends with literary riffs on the name Schiavo, which is Italian for "slave." Paragraph 1 portrays Schiavo as a metaphorical slave — "slave to an atrophied brain... slave to bitter fighting.. slave to... court hearings... to politicians...." And the last paragraph ends:

[T]he woman born Theresa Marie Schindler had no control over the powerful forces that controlled her own fate. Just as if she were a schiavo, a slave.

Is that poignant or maudlin? "Slave" was the name of the man who fought for her death. Schindler was the name of the parents who fought for her life. And slavery is a profound topic unto itself. Should it be repurposed as a metaphor? It's a facile metaphor, the literal meaning of the woman's married name, and it degrades the meaning of the word "slave," because lying inert in bed is not much like slavery, which is forced labor. Slaves are human beings with minds capable of making decisions who are deprived moment-by-moment of the autonomy that belongs by right to the human mind.

Terri Schiavo's freedom and autonomy were accorded profound respect. Her problem was her incapacity to form or communicate her choice. That's terribly sad, but it is not slavery.

Man, paralyzed by a stroke, hears doctors discussing harvesting his organs.

"I heard them tell my girlfriend and my relatives that there was no hope... I couldn't do anything. I could only see and hear. I couldn't move my body."

"They looked at an x-ray of my brain, and when they had done that, they told my girlfriend that it wasn't good and that I wouldn't live.... I could hear her crying the whole time, but I couldn't do anything.... I heard them talking about donation, they wanted to do some tests on my liver and my kidney, so they could give them to some people.... I was scared because I thought that I was going to die then, and a hard death... I remember I thought, what will happen if they cremate me, will I see the fire and feel the fire?"

Jimi Fritze, 43, lived to tell the tale because another doctor happened to look at the x-ray and see that he could recover.

But don't worry, this happened in Sweden.

"I don’t want to be morbid, but I just want to remind you that you have control here."

"We can turn the device off at any time. (It is your device and your life.)"

Script prepared by a doctor, for use speaking to a patient, quoted in a NYT article titled "A Decision Deferred: Turning Off the Pacemaker."

"Given the limited life expectancy of someone my age, is it justified to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend a nonagenarian’s life a little longer?"

"That is a question needing more discussion than I can undertake here. I would hardly be an unbiased voice, since it was my life that was at stake, and I was very glad it was saved. Of course, in our health system, charges may have little relation to true costs, making such a discussion still more difficult to pursue."

From an article in The New York Review of Books titled "On Breaking One’s Neck," written by a doctor who fell down the stairs. ("I can remember only a few details, but recall being taken for a CT scan and other X-ray studies. But very quickly after that, I became short of breath and started to choke. I was told later that I exclaimed, 'I need to be intubated'....")

"NYT's Bill Keller thinks he's enlightened for endorsing palliative care. Here's how he's affirming right-wing mania."

The subhead at Salon. The headline is: "How Times columnist Bill Keller aids Sarah Palin’s 'death panel' smear."

It's not a smear if it's true, but Salon's Brian Beutler asserts that "death panels" is "the single most contemptible lie about Obamacare."

What about the famous lie-of-the-year "If you like your plan you can keep your plan"? Must we have a contemptibility face-off between these 2 lies? Is the battle to be the most contemptible lie different from being the least true assertion of fact? Different from being the lie with the most clout in the political process? And if it's a contemptibility contest, who's the judge? Whose mind is feeling this contempt? Brian Beutler's?

More subtly, we need to distinguish the form of expression from the substance. "Death panels" was a hotly emotional way to express concern about something that was real — that there will have to be rationing and denials of expensive treatments to some older/sicker patients. It is contemned because of its power to replace close attention to the facts with instinctive, quick commitment to a political position — opposition to Obamacare.

"If you like your plan you can keep your plan" was a deliberately cool, seemingly unemotional way to assert something that was absolutely not true. It is contemned because it was an outright, knowing falsehood, and it reassured and pacified people who would have been lit on fire with opposition if they'd understood what was coming their way.

What was the single most contemptible lie about Obamacare?
	Death panels.
	If you like your plan you can keep your plan.
	Something else or neither is a lie, at least not a contemptible lie.
pollcode.com free polls

"In a happy coincidence, the grandmother hypothesis comes along just as Americans enter what might be called the Age of Old Age."

"America's biggest generation, the baby-boomers, began retiring in 2011. This gerontocracy is expected to drain our wealth."

By 2060, more than 20 percent of all Americans will be 65 or older, up from 13 percent in 2010. More than 92 million oldsters will roam the land, if roaming is within their power. People who fret about the federal budget point out that, by 2011, Social Security and Medicare were already eating up a third of it. Looming in the near future is the prospect that both programs' trust funds will vanish as the number of workers paying into the system goes down.

But are senior citizens really "greedy geezers" (a term made popular by this magazine in 1988) about to bankrupt us? The grandmother hypothesis suggests not. It suggests that we should see the coming abundance of over-65-year-olds as an opportunity, not a disaster....

We Boomers must get out in front of the death panels. "The grandmother hypothesis" — whatever the hell it is — is the kind of propaganda we need. And, young people, did you scoff at my use of the term "death panels"? I hope so! It means our propaganda is working. But how well will it work when more than 92 million oldsters will roam the land, if roaming is within their power. If you young people decide you're tired of funding our pensions and our health care, capacity to roam will not be enough. We'll need to run.

"Is there any evidence that more old people will make special contributions now lacking with an average life expectancy close to 80?"

"And exactly what are the potential social benefits?," writes Daniel Callahan in a NYT op-ed. He's 83 and consumed perhaps more than his proper share of health care resources when he had a 7-hour heart operation to save his life a few years ago.

I have often been struck, at funerals of the elderly, of the common phrase that while the deceased will be missed, he or she led a “full life.” Adding years to a life doesn’t necessarily make it any fuller.

We may properly hope that scientific advances help ensure, with ever greater reliability, that young people manage to become old people. We are not, however, obliged to help the old become indefinitely older. Indeed, our duty may be just the reverse: to let death have its day.

But no, no, no, there are no death panels. Just nudging, withholding, moralizing, disparaging.

What is the social benefit of these old people?

It used to be considered immoral to ask that question.

ADDED: Here's a NYT op-ed from August 2012 also stressing 80 years as the appropriate life-span:

I provided four possible answers [to the question how long would you like to live?]: 80 years, currently the average life span in the West; 120 years, close to the maximum anyone has lived; 150 years, which would require a biotech breakthrough; and forever, which rejects the idea that life span has to have any limit at all....

The results: some 60 percent opted for a life span of 80 years....

This one ends with a quote from Albert Einstein: "As he lay dying of an abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1955, he refused surgery, saying: 'It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.'"