Thoughts on euthanasia

[Ravenshire]

This legislation exists. In Oregon and Washington, the Death with Dignity Act was passed in 1993, showing it is possible to get the language correct.

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Although Oregon’s groundbreaking law remains widely popular, the occurrence of a hastened death is relatively rare, averaging just more than 44 hastened deaths per year over a 15-year span.

In 2012, the most recent year for which we have an annual statistical report, terminally ill patients who died after ingesting medication under the Act accounted for 0.2 percent of all deaths in Oregon. The top three concerns patients expressed to their attending physicians when requesting medication under the Act reflect the patients’ desire to maintain control over their final days. Of the end-of-life concerns expressed, the least common was “financial implications of treatment.”

Reviewing 15 years of data in the aggregate, 1,050 terminally ill patients have received prescriptions, and 673 of these patients have ingested the prescribed medications to hasten their deaths, while 377 chose not to. Over 15 years, only 2 percent of the people who used the law did not have insurance coverage. In 2012, excluding those few for which insurance status was unknown, all of the participants were covered by some form of insurance.

http://www.americanbar.org/publications/...y_act.html

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I had no idea that Washington had also passed a Death With Dignity act. Gives me more choice where to move if the time ever comes, and hope that other states (c'mon Colorado) will do the same as time passes.