The Religious Right has again slit their own throats on an issue.During the debates on health care reform, the evangelical community protested the inclusion in a proposed law, HR 3200, of paid Medicare for end-of-life counseling. You may read the details here by scrolling down to pages 425-430 but the summary is doctors would be paid for helping patients make the patient's choices about important matters such as choosing simple palliative care over a continued fight against a terminal illness, or being resuscitated or having a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) on file. The counseling legistlation would have also mandated that the doctor talk to the patient about living wills, hospice, and other resources for the patient to access in making end-of-life decisions. The legistlation was very pro-life in offering patients the ability to decide to live with dignity and control over their final health care decisions.
The evangelical community, in killing this legistlation, has unwittingly shortened the lives and made the lives more pain filled of those they publicly defended. The Obama administration was not the "death panels". The Religious Right pulled the plugs on those with terminal illness and for the elderly.
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