A bipartisan group of US lawmakers has urged the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to introduce new monitoring rules to ensure that vulnerable people receiving hospice care are not discriminated against or encouraged to end their lives through assisted suicide.
“Every person has inherent worth and dignity, including those facing their final days,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said in a statement.
“Hospice should be a place of compassion, comfort and care, not a place where people feel quietly pressured to end their lives through assisted suicide.”
Lankford, together with Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Reps. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) and Jose Luis Correa (D-Calif.), signed the letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The letter was sent on July 9.
The lawmakers argue that physician-assisted suicide raises “significant informed consent issues” as well as concerns about disability and age discrimination. They note that the “vast majority” of people who receive physician-assisted suicide are enrolled in hospice care.
Assisted suicide is legal in 13 states and the District of Columbia. Unlike in Europe and Canada, where a doctor or other medical professional typically administers the lethal dose of medication, US laws require the patient to self-administer the drugs.
The letter cites longstanding concerns from disability advocates that “some people’s lives, particularly those of people with disabilities, will be ended without their fully informed and free consent, through mistakes, abuse, insufficient knowledge, and the unjust lack of better options”. These amount to “grave informed consent issues”, the lawmakers said.
They also argue that annual state reports show patients commonly seek physician-assisted suicide “not due to pain or concerns about future pain, but for disability-related reasons”.
“Consequently, many individuals with disabilities warn that states legalising physician-assisted suicide send the message that the lives of persons with disabilities are less valued in society,” the letter said.
The lawmakers also raised concerns about age discrimination and elder abuse, warning that legal assisted suicide could leave older people vulnerable to financial pressure from those who stand to benefit from an inheritance or life insurance payout.
They further argued that legalising physician-assisted suicide sends a contradictory message about suicide prevention at a time when, they said, “America is facing an epidemic of suicide”.
“Peer-reviewed data shows that where physician-assisted suicide is legalised, rates of suicide increase,” the letter said.
Legal physician-assisted suicide undermines suicide prevention efforts, said the lawmakers, by “normalis[ing] premature death for vulnerable populations, and push[ing] society away from robust care, support, and the protection of life”.
