NotARocketScientist: That already exists. You don't get to orchestrate the event for which your insurance policy pays out, just as you can't make a claim when you commit arson or pay someone to steal your car. Suicide is an exclusion in every life insurance policy I've ever seen.

My insurance (I think it is state farm) covers suicide if you've held the policy for more than 3 years.

Doom MD: ... I'm not a fan of Obama, but that "death panel" nonsense was a load of tripe, it was a push to promote people setting advance directives. Assisted suicide is counter to the mission of physicians; they're not executioners. Palliative medicine does fantastic things to manage the suffering of the ill.

It is not unethical to give opoids to relieve pain even if it can cut short the patient's life. Dying patients should not have unmanaged pain. The terminally ill are allowed to eat for pleasure, but since they're ill if they choose not to that is fine too (it's part of the natural process of dying). If they don't eat nursing staff can moisten the mouth with ice cubes, swabs, or even ice cream. I can go on and on.

Mice name for this discussion!
The 'death panels' were actually proposed by a republican senator from North Carolina, proving there are some republicans with heart.

My husband's grandmother had Alzheimer's. The home she was in said that she just stopped eating. I think it was suicide when she realized what was happening.

You dont want a doctor who is playing fast and loose with the absolute fundamental ethical tenents of the profession. Again, palliative care is completely driven by the patient's preferences. The patient and his preferences are what is driving care. Asking doctors to murder you instead of reaching out for palliative care would indicate to me the patient likely has had substandard management of his/her medical issues and would most benefit from the above care.

How does Pallitive care help when it is the mind that is going. One of my ex-bosses had a father-in-law who died ...
Terminal alzheimer's disease you can allow him to eat what he wants for pleasure. If he aspirates (food goes down his air tube) or gets a UTI, both of which they will get frequently in this advanced state, don't treat it with antibiotics. Give medication for comfort instead of intubating him and scouring his body with antiobiotics to treat an infection that will return very shortly.

Haruko_Haruhara: ...and they were all gone before I hit 30 (I'm 31 now). Screw cancer.



Our experiences are very similar it seems.

I'm 31 now and I had three funerals to go to this past month which made me count the number of family and friends I have lost.....20. 18 of the 20 were lost in the past 6 years.....3 of the 20 were cancer including my mother.

People who are against this sort of thing obviously have never, as a 20 year old, sat in a growing pool of their own mother's blood while shoving the fat back into her face so you could mend it with butterfly bandages. All the while she stares into your eyes asking to go home and for my father (where she was, with him beside me). She was too weak to walk on her own but did not want to burden us by waking us up to take her to the bathroom.

All of this was because she could not legally end her own life as she tried to do just a year before by writing a fake prescription (because no doctor would/could) and then getting arrested for it when she took it to the pharmacy. She was an oncologist and knew that she didn't want to die in a hospital, and feared they would enable her to live too long.

Charges were dropped because of her condition.

She made it 6 years after a 6 months to live diagnosis....she didn't really "live" the last three. The face splitting incident was the beginning of a very long end

The My Little Pony Killer: Skyrmion: I just know that if I am ever sick and dying and in pain, and am being kept alive in a hospital by being hooked up to a machine, I hope someone also gives me a gun with a bullet in it...

...so I can shoot any farker who tries to unplug my machine.

Uh huh. Get back to us when you actually are sick and dying in pain, hooked up to a machine.

It's great to know that there are people out there incapable of comprehending that some people would not want to be killed in that situation. That sure makes me feel better about these types of laws.

Strix occidentalis: I'm not sure what I would want. It's not an easy subject to ponder while you're still a hale and hearty twenty-something who's not even out of academia yet.

I wasn't going to share this, because it's very personal. But if it helps motivate you to talk about it with some of the right people, I think it will justify it.

My ex-girlfriend died at 32, of a particularly aggressive form of leukemia. She'd been diagnosed less than five years earlier, probably close to your age, when the first symptoms appeared. She was a soccer player and an operatic singer who'd been in excellent health most of her life. I always assumed she'd outlive me.

Others I'd known over the years also died young, but they were children. This was my first real wake-up call that there is no time in life when you can bet on death being remote, and count on having plenty of time to figure it all out. It's not just random accidents or poor health that take the young and healthy. Don't wait until the pressure's on, and you're surrounded by people and machines with no peace and quiet and privacy to discuss it at length and ponder it on your own, undistracted by symptoms and tests. Even that's assuming you'll have *some* chance, which might not be the case. If you don't deal with it, someone else will have to. The choice is yours, but only while you're able.

FTFA : Washington followed Oregon in allowing terminally ill patients to get a prescription for drugs that will hasten death. Critics of such laws feared that poor people would be pressured to kill themselves because they or their families could not afford end-of-life care. But the demographics of patients who have gotten the prescriptions are surprisingly different than expected, according to data collected by Oregon and Washington through 2011.

This shouldn't have come as a surprise. Poor people can't afford it. There are multiple doctor visits required to get the permission, then the cost of the drugs.

robohobo: So long as insurance can't be claimed afterwards, die how you like.

Why shouldn't you be able to claim insurance? If you've been paying for life insurance for 20 years, you get cancer or Alzheimer's or Lou Gehrig's disease, whatever, and you decide that it's time to go, why shouldn't your insurance pay out? The insurance company should just get to keep the money? We're not talking about some healthy young person, we're talking about someone with a terminal disease. They are going to die anyway.

Regardless, it doesn't work the way you think it works. Laws regarding life insurance has something usually called the two year rule. In some states, the time limit may be different, but the same thing still happens. Once you've had the insurance for two years, they have to pay out.

indylaw: That already exists. You don't get to orchestrate the event for which your insurance policy pays out, just as you can't make a claim when you commit arson or pay someone to steal your car. Suicide is an exclusion in every life insurance policy I've ever seen.

Suicide is an exclusion during the contestable period, which is two years in most states, and one year in others. Once that time has passed, they have to pay even in the case of suicide.

Google "life insurance suicide two year rule" to find more info. I'll include a link for those doubting me.

http://www.ehow.com/info_7999313_insurance-work-suicide.html

AbbeySomeone: robohobo: So long as insurance can't be claimed afterwards, die how you like.

Why shouldn't insurance be claimed?

For the same reason that fire insurance doesn't pay people who burn their own houses down, I would imagine.

My grandfather was one of the funniest guys I've ever known. He could make anything into a joke in a split second, educated himself from nothing and built a family business that will last generations.

When he got older, I saw my grandfather's mind go about a year before his body did.

That will not be me. Ever.

Reverend Monkeypants: My friend's mother just died, and died well. She had a stroke that disabled her to no longer be able to swallow food. She had a DNR that included no feeding tube. They basically put her to sleep. R.I.P. She was awesome and wanted to be remembered that way, not as a drooling, tube-fed, half vegetable for as many years as they could keep a withering shell alive. Her son-in-law has a private will with some of us so if he is horribly maimed and becomes entirely dependent on those around him, sapping their lives away to keep his broken body alive, that we should hand him a loaded gun if it comes to it.

These are sane, loving, people. Do you know how hard it is to get a DNR these days? For a 30 year old? Harder than finding a doctor who'll give you a vasectomy without reading you the bible.

When Mr. Tergiversada and I made out our will, we were between 40 and 50. We included an Advanced Directive, a DNR, and Medical Power of Attorney at the same time. It's a good idea to include these so that your wishes can be made known. Link

Sylvia_Bandersnatch: Niveras: As long as you've also set enough money aside and have all the legality done up and approved to have your corpse disposed of, I'm fine with it too. Just because your life ends at a particular time, doesn't mean your responsibilities up and vanish at that instant. Take care not to dump all that hassle on your survivors. You're free to do so, since you're kind of in absentia at that point; it's just a dick thing to do.

But these concerns pertain to *anyone* who's dying. How is this relevant to euthanasia?

You're choosing when to die. If you get hit with cancer, it is not always possible to plot out how the disease will progress, and generally people are going to fight as much as they can, so they're not necessarily going to plan (or fund) for the worse case scenario when that money and time could go toward survival.

In all honesty, though, I'm taking a wider view of this than strictly limiting suffering, and it is only under those other onditions that my comment matters at all. If you've the lost battle against whatever debilitating disease or condition, such that you only have an indeterminate time of suffering left, well, I'm not going to begrudge you the easy way out, even if your affairs aren't all in order.

propasaurus: Ambivalence: I would never want medication to end my life, or even to make dying easier (to a point). When I die I want to be fully present for it, not in some drugged up haze. I don't want to die unconscious or so quickly I don't even know what's going on.

That's a valid choice, but I disagree. I would take the medication and go out on my own terms in my own time.
But the point is, how you go should be up to you. And you don't get to choose for me.

It may not be me, but sooner or later, someone will choose for you. It really isn't up to you.

Yes.

I've been a hospice care volunteer for 10 years. to me what matters is quality of life, not quantity. there is often such peace in accepting death and in saying "i choose to stop forcing my body to go on".

Sometimes, you have to let go to be free. there is peace in the decision.
Every one of us lives with a terminal diagnosis. It is all about what we make of this very finite existence.
for me, I want to die on my own terms.