Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: Oregon taxpayers will soon pay to kill poor people

Thursday, March 12, 1998 | 10:52 a.m.

FOUR YEARS AGO, when Jack Kevorkian was set free by a jury after his arrest for helping kill a patient, the following three paragraphs appeared in this column.

"Your medical insurance has expired and therefore it's time to go, Grandpa" isn't the kind of conduct acceptable among decent human beings but, sadly, has become more than a casual conversation-piece in recent years. It ranks right up there with the suggestion that "your child has a club foot and will eventually cost you more money than you can afford unless we kill her now."

You may believe that these kinds of suggestions couldn't be made nor executed in our society. Well, you had better look around you and open your eyes, because they represent exactly the kind of society that Jack Kevorkian and the advocates of euthanasia want to create for you. Monday, a Michigan jury, which had five members from nursing-related occupations, took you one step closer.

Think about this column the night you hear your nephews and nieces talking in the next room and one of them says, "Uncle Ted is just getting too expensive to keep around any longer. It's time for the doctor to arrange for him to join Aunt Zoe."

That time has arrived, and , if you live in Oregon, the state will use your tax dollars to pay for the death-dealing drugs the physician will order for the poor person wanting to take his or her own life.

A paragraph in an Associated Press story from Portland tells us: "The Health Services Commission voted 10-1 that delivering lethal doses of prescription drugs should be covered as a 'medical service' for the 270,000 low-income residents covered under the state's health plan."

Although, like several writers, I've written about the end result of physician-assisted suicide taking us down the slippery slope to murder, that day has also arrived. Kevorkian has helped kill dozens of people over the past several years, and today he doesn't even try to cover up his dirty work by declaring the dead as having been terminally ill.

Last week, the Michigan dealer of death made clear that he will determine who's to be helped commit suicide. Roosevelt Dawson, not terminally ill, was paralyzed and wanted to end his life. He demanded to be released from a hospital so Kevorkian could help him die. Dawson's killing demonstrated that Kevorkian has openly declared that quality of life can be the determining factor for his assisting in a suicide. Actually, this has been the major reason for several of the killings he has assisted over recent years. Past Kevorkian-assisted suicides have included people with mental illness and Alzheimer's disease.

In the Netherlands, where physician-assisted suicides are legal, we have reported that, in 1990, Dutch doctors killed about 5,400 consenting patients, and another 5,900 patients were killed without their consent. An official estimate is that more than 20 percent of those killed without consent were competent but were not asked about their desires. The doctors who killed without consent gave excuses that included: patients had a low quality of life, were suffering or were creating a family hardship.

So, now we are where the Netherlands was eight years ago. We have rapidly become a society, with Oregon leading the way, that treats people who are ill, tired, despondent or crippled as unwanted burdens, rather than seeking ways to help them, and allow ourselves to profit from the experience.

The push by large health-care organizations will increase the use of physician-assisted killing rather than pay for expensive medicine and care. HMOs in Oregon probably had their say in the promotion of tax dollars for killing drugs to be administered to poor people. This will encourage the HMOs in other states to promote this cheaper way to solve expensive medical problems.

We no longer have to worry about Oregon's citizens going down that so-called slippery slope to murder. They are already there, and the rest of our nation is close behind.

Grandpa, the medical bills are piling up and you don't seem very happy; don't you think it's time to go?