FAMILY HEALTH CARE DECISIONS ACT (FHCDA) Key Points

Sponsors:  Sen. Seward / A. Gottfried; Bill # S.5807/ # A.5406A

The Right to Life should be for all, and should protect the unborn from abortion as well as the vulnerable born - especially the dependent elderly, persons with disabilities, and very sick persons - from euthanasia.

-  Denying life-saving or life-sustaining medical treatment against the will of a patient just as surely kills a patient as a lethal injection and constitutes involuntary euthanasia.

-  Health care providers should provide treatment based on whether the treatment will work physiologically – not based on judgments of a patient’s perceived “quality of life” and the doctor’s value judgment of whether or not the patient’s life is worth living.

-  Providers and insurers should not be in the business of deciding who “deserves” treatment based on what they perceive is the patient’s “usefulness” (utilitarian model) or potential “happiness.”  That is a form of tyranny of the powerful over the weak.

-  All kinds of death-making have been released historically by those who subscribe to the “utilitarian” (usefulness) model of life.

-  Societies are judged by how they care for and treat the most weak and vulnerable.

-  If the FHCDA passes without our protective amendments, a hospital will be able to legally override a family’s wishes and deny treatment, and refuse treatment until a patient is transferred to a willing provider.  Hospital “futility” policies should not be used as clandestine vehicles for rationing of health care.

-   “Futility” should address medical or physiological futility, as opposed to the new view that a treatment can be called “futile” if it will help a patient whom the doctor believes is better off dead, because of disability or age, or other discriminatory factors.

-  Good, active pain management techniques, which are available today, need to be promoted and used to relieve a patient’s suffering.

-  Food and water, however provided to a patient, should never be considered “treatment.”  All members of the human family deserve the basic sustenance needed to live.

-  FHCDA fully ensures that a surrogate’s decision to reject life-sustaining care is carried out.  If the bill is really meant to respect families’ decisions, then the bill must also protect patients and family members by honoring their decisions for life-sustaining and life-saving treatment completely.  All “loopholes” in the law now allowing withholding of treatment must be removed.

-  NYS lawmakers must Repeal Section 2964 subdivision (3) of Article 29-B of the Public Health Law, the “secret DNR.”  New York law currently provides for a doctor to place a “Do Not Resuscitate” order upon a competent patient, if the doctor believes a discussion of CPR refusal will be sufficiently upsetting for the patient.  This is absurd, and blatantly authorizes involuntary euthanasia.  A competent patient must always be involved in, and give informed consent to, any order to withhold life-saving treatment.  And if incompetent, a patient’s advance directive requesting treatment should be honored.  At no time should a doctor act as a self-appointed arbiter of death.

-  The federal Child Abuse law of 1984 ensures that “medically indicated treatment” is provided to infants with disabilities.  We must preserve the hard-won rights of children born with disabilities to receive treatment.

-  If a hospital or provider does not honor the decision of a surrogate for life-sustaining treatment, and does not offer transfer or treatment pending transfer, and the withholding of treatment contributes to the patient’s death, the hospital or provider must be held responsible for wrongful death.

                                                                                                                                      June 2006