George Will on Slow Medicine and Giving EOL Patients Dignity and Autonomy

George Will writes:

Almost 30 percent of Medicare expenditures are for patients in the last six months of life and about 16 percent of patients die in, or soon after leaving, intensive care units. Financial reasons should not be decisive in setting end-of-life policy, but Cederquist notes that reducing “expensive and inappropriate care” — costly and agonizing resistance to imminent death — “is the lowest-tech thing we can do in medicine.” Hence the importance of “slow medicine geriatrics,” avoiding a “rush to those interventions that build on each other” and thereby enmesh doctors and patients in ethical conundrums. The American Medical Association remains opposed to physician assistance in dying; the California Medical Association has moved from opposition to neutrality. Litigation has been unsuccessful in seeking judicial affirmation of a right that California’s legislature should establish. Legislation to do this has been authored by Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, chair of the Democratic caucus. ... Jennifer Glass, a Californian who died Aug. 11, drew one. She said to her state legislators, “I’m doing everything I can to extend my life. No one should have the right to prolong my death.” The Economist reports that in the 17 years under Oregon’s pioneering 1997 law, just 1,327 people have received prescriptions for lethal medications — about 74 a year — and one-third of those did not use them. Possessing the option was sufficient reassurance. There is nobility in suffering bravely borne, but also in affirming at the end the distinctive human dignity of autonomous choice. Brittany Maynard, who chose to be with loved ones when she self-administered her lethal medications, was asleep in five minutes and soon dead.