Fear Factor

When Sarah Palin goes out stumping and using the phrase "death panel" to try and re-define end of life care and counseling, my stomach turns. I can't imagine what her motivations are, other than a pure and unadulterated attempt to stoke fear in the far right wing of her party. It amounts to nothing more than pandering, and it's in very poor taste.

I have dealt with more than one of her "death panels", and they have been composed of health-care professionals who wanted to give everyone involved the information they needed to determine treatment for the person they loved. They were straight-forward and painfully honest. They told us things we didn't want to hear, but they did so honestly.

That's what end-of-life counseling boils down to: having the right information to make the right decision, whether it is the patient or the family making those painful decisions.

The way the radical right has framed this debate, I would be a murderer for asking that treatment be withdrawn from a terminally ill patient because I knew what was going on and what the outcomes would almost certainly be.

If you follow this debate to its natural end from the Palin point of view, I should not have been informed or had the opportunity to withdraw care. And no doctor or nurse should have been able to give me the information I needed to make the right choices, much less mention that it was available. That the right to counseling on this most difficult issue shouldn't exist.

It is pandering on an obscene degree that belies a gross lack of conscience or sense of moral justice.

Terminally ill people deserve the right to good medical counsel. They need to know the possible outcomes and the implications of them. And so do patient's families.

That anyone would question this centrally important part of health care leaves me walking around with my hands in the air saying "What? What? She didn't really say that, did she? Oh, my God. She did."

Campaigning on a platform of restricting end-of-life care (and she's campaigning-you betcha') should give every voter pause. Apart from restrictions on free speech and professional practice, it's just plain old wrong.

Limiting health-care providers' speech in those situations is not only immoral: it's irresponsible and unethical. It would leave the provider in the position of violating the law or violating the oath they took as a licensed professional.

Given all the problems we have with health-care right now, this is one more thing that should not be politicized or bastardized. And it has been.

When people are dieing, they deserve the ability to determine their futures. And when they can't make those decisions, their family needs to be able to do the same with the best information possible.

As a people, we should not let our cultural reticence to talk about death infect the debate about health care reform that is decades over-due. And politicians who use blatantly false statements to exploit that fear do their constituents a great disservice. All Americans would be better served by a healthy and honest debate about the issue.