Asssisted Suicide

While there is no ethuanasia specifically in the House bill, there is this --- Washington Post, "Undue Influence: the House Bill Skews End-of-Life Counsel."

When seniors who don't have them arrive in a hospital terminally ill and incapacitated, families and medical workers wrestle with uncertainty — while life-prolonging machinery runs, often at Medicare's expense. This has consequences for families and for the federal budget.

Enter Section 1233 of the health-care bill drafted in the Democratic-led House, which would pay doctors to give Medicare patients end-of-life counseling every five years — or sooner if the patient gets a terminal diagnosis.

On the far right, this is being portrayed as a plan to force everyone over 65 to sign his or her own death warrant. That's rubbish. Federal law already bars Medicare from paying for services "the purpose of which is to cause, or assist in causing," suicide, euthanasia or mercy killing. Nothing in Section 1233 would change that.

The actual text of section 1233 can be found here via Thomas, the Library of Congress data base (if the link doesn't get you to section 1233, search the data base using H.R. 3200, then go to section 1233).