322: Assisted suicide bill opposed in Berkeley, 1999

322.

Published news story by Lurene Helzer, Berkeley Daily Planet, April 28, 1999, “Assisted suicide bill opposed.” The Berkeley council heard views on legal suicide at this meeting. Assisted suicide has always been a sensitive issue in the United States.

It was interesting to hear how afraid some disabled residents of Berkeley were of assisted suicide law, recognition of the act by law. It raised the ghost, for them, of governments starving or burying the retarded as socially undesirable, or of insurance companies declining to cover the cost of care for serious illness. That is, the insurance would theoretically refuse to cover cancer treatments, but would gladly cover the cost of a physician-assisted suicide.

They sounded to me paranoid that night in 1999 Berkeley. But in 2009, a discussion like this would gather far more public interest. It’s tragic because it’s not that people want to die, but that they refuse to die – or can’t stand death -- leaving their families with millions in medical bills. To be fair, it’s true throughout the world, not just the United States. It’s less of a problem in Europe and Canada, however.

Millions of people prefer European health systems because the cost of public health is shared. In 2009, it’s difficult to make predictions about where the American health system is going. Change seems likely by 2015, though. Major reform will be hard to put off for another decade, according to everything I have heard and read in the past two years.