House Health Care Reform Bill

The House Health Care Reform bill is posted on line at http://docs.house.gov/edlabor/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf. The section on Advance Care Planning Consultation, pages 425 to 430 is troublesome. The consultation will be required every 5 years if the individual involved has not had a consultation and its purpose will include " An explanation of the continuum of end of life services and supports available, including palliative care and hospice, and benefits for such services and supports that are available under this title." It further describes a health care practitioner as a "physician and a nurse practitioner or physician's assistant who has the authority under State law to sign orders for life sustaining treatments." Page 430 details that "an indication to limit some or all or specified interventions." It further describes levels of treatment to include " the use of artificially administered nutrition or hydration". Food and water can never be described as a "health" treatment, they are simple requirements for human existence and to describe them as a "treatment" will provide the moral cover for euthanasia. This whole section reeks of the Culture of Death from the consultation every 5 years on your "options" to orders being signed by a nurse practitioner or PA who has authority under State law to sign orders for "life sustaining treatments" to looking at food and water as a treatment. People will be pressured to stop being a burden on family and society, we will find the authorization to sign life sustaining orders can of course be withheld and we will see someone make a determination that food and water fall under a protocol that a person decided they did not want at the end of their natural life. All under the guise of the Law and Benevolence and Health Care.