Cause Of Death: Socialized Healthcare

When they killed Terri Schiavo, they said it was about "choice". They were lying, of course. It was, and remains, about having the power to kill (H/T: Ori):

Chaim Shmuel Golubchuk, a”h, has gone to his eternal reward. But the issues that pitted his children Percy Golubchuk and Miriam Geller against Grace General Hospital in Winnipeg over the last seven months will long be with us.

After being informed by their father’s doctors that they intended to end his life by removing his ventilation and feeding tube, the Golubchuk children sought an injunction against the hospital. They argued that their father would adamantly oppose any attempt to shorten his life, which is forbidden by Jewish law.

Yeah, that "it's against the patient's religious beliefs" didn't gain much traction for Terri Schiavo's parents, either.

After the entry of a temporary injunction, the hospital pursued an aggressive legal and public relations campaign. At one recent hearing, the hospital was represented by a team of no less than seven high-priced attorneys (despite its claims that providing care for Mr. Golubchuk was draining the hospital’s resources.) Three doctors resigned from the hospital’s intensive care unit claiming they were being forced to violate their ethical beliefs by continuing to treat Mr. Golubchuk rather than simply hastening his death. One of them graphically described in a public letter how the doctors in the ward would be left “to surgically hack away at his infected flesh at the bedside in order to keep the infection [from bedsores] at bay.”

So, the "ethical beliefs" of pro-death healthcare providers control, but the ethical beliefs of pro-life doctors and pharmacists who don't want to be forced into participating in abortions can be chucked out the window. Got it.

Charges that “hopeless” efforts to prolong Mr. Golubchuk’s life were diverting valuable medical resources from other patients aired continuously in the Canadian media. One editorial in the journal of the Canadian Medical Association went so far as to accuse the Golubchuk children of using their religious beliefs to gain special treatment for their father.

Refraining from killing the patient is now "special treatment."

And numerous letters appeared in the Canadian press decrying or ridiculing the Golubchuk’s religious fanaticism.

And so much for liberals' famous multicultural tolerance.

Dr. Leon Zacharowicz, a New York neurologist, who devoted hundreds of hours of pro bono time to advising the Golubchuk family, noted in his court affidavits that the hospital had moved to cut off life support on the grounds that Mr. Golubchuk had only minimal brain function without his having been evaluated by a neurologist or such basic tests as an EEG or CAT scan having been administered.Yet at one point subsequent to the issuance of the temporary injunction, Mr. Golubchuk was described as “awake, alert, sitting up in a chair at times, more interactive and shaking hands purposively.”

Again, this sounds remarkably like the Terri Schiavo case; don't use medical expertise or technology to determine the facts of the case, just hire lawyers to assert what you want to be true, in order to reach the desired conclusion: killing.

...

The hospital’s argument that the treatment of Mr. Golubchuk severely impaired its ability to serve other patients with much better chances of survival would seem, at best, to have been highly exaggerated. A doctor who recently visited the intensive care ward reported that there were numerous empty beds and that the staff paid almost no attention to Mr. Golubchuk. That inattention may have eventually contributed to the bedsores that apparently killed him. Dr. Dave Easton, who works in the hospital’s ICU, admitted in a June 17 piece in the Winnipeg Free Press, in which he shared his ethical dilemmas about continuing to treat Mr. Golubchuk, that “until the last few days, the level of care was no different than that of any patient on a ‘medical ward’ (with the exception of a ventilator), and essentially unchanged for the last number of months since his admission.”

AS MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY improves the ability to prolong life, end of life issues like those raised by the Golubchuk case will become more and more frequent. Many of us will face such issues ourselves or on behalf of loved ones. That is one reason why it is so crucial that each of us prepare “living wills,” such as that developed by Agudath Israel, to specify a competent halachic authority to make those crucial decisions for us in the event that we are incapacitated.

The Extraordinary Wife and I have living wills which direct that we are not to be killed in such fashion.

But the nature of the arguments made in the Golubchuk case makes clear that such legal protections could one day prove of limited utility. There is, of course, a wide range of legislation dealing with end of life decisions between various Canadian provinces in Canada and American states. Most American states apply a “brain death” standard to determine when death has occurred. New York and several others, however, provide a religious exemption for those who do not accept “brain death” as the proper standard.

The Golubchuk case, while not about “brain death” (which even the hospital admitted had not occurred),

... again, just like Terri Schiavo...

demonstrates how precarious any form of “religious exemption” might prove to be, and the pressures that could amount against showing any deference to the religious beliefs of patients. In that context, the charge that Mr. Golubchuk’s children were somehow taking advantage of their religion should give us all pause.
...

In Mr. Golubchuk’s case there could be no dispute about what his wishes were. This was no replay of the infamous Terry Schiavo case.

Clearly, I disagree; the Terri Schiavo case was a rehearsal for other cases like this. The primary difference is who was claiming the power to kill. With Terri, it was her husband, who had moved in with another woman and had two children with her. In Mr. Golubchuk's case, it was the medical establishment.

Yet the hospital and his doctors viewed those wishes as irrelevant. The Statement of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba on Withholding and Withdrawing Life-Sustaining Treatment, published after the issuance of the first injunction, explicitly provides that “physicians have the authority to make medical decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment from a patient without the consent of the patient or the patient’s family.”

Jeff Blackner, executive director of the office of ethics of the Canadian Medical Association told Reuters, “We want to make sure that clinical decisions are left to physicians and not judges.” (We shall consider next week the implications of the claim that doctors should have absolute autonomy and its underlying premise that scientific knowledge offers particular insight into the most difficult moral decisions.)

This is the culture of death. This is what Barack Obama wants for America. This is what Doug Kmiec and the "Catholic" for Obama are supporting.