Faith in the Health Care Debate
Abortion, euthanasia and health care reform, Part 2
By Alex Metherell, MD, PhD and Pamela Metherell, The Layman, October 15, 2009
In this article we are going to look at assisted suicide and euthanasia and how they are likely to be influenced by the upcoming health care reforms.
Click here for more Layman articles on health care reform
As in our article on abortion we will start with what has been the ethical standard for over two millennia as defined by Hippocrates in the Hippocratic Oath:
I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.
This is a clear secular ethical proscription against assisted suicide and euthanasia. Those of us who live under Judeo-Christian ethics find additional mandates in the Old Testament and in the words of Jesus. We hold our lives in trust for the Creator God to whom we belong.
As medical science has progressed it has become possible to increasingly prolong life through a variety of life support means. Pain is now effectively controlled through the use of medications. But these advances have brought their own ethical questions. How should life support be given when there is no hope of improvement? When the patient is still lucid and capable of making his or her own medical decisions, is it ethical and Biblical to discontinue life support if the patient wishes to cease prolonging the inevitable? Few people would argue going against the patient’s express desires, whether they are expressed because the patient is competent and capable of communicating those wishes at the time or they have been expressed in a living will that the patient has executed while he or she was able to do so.
We would like to share the stories of three people whose life-and-death experiences have inspired us.
Heather was the 7-year-old daughter of a couple we knew in a young married group in our church that met regularly for Christian fellowship, prayer and Bible study. We were about to go to their home when we received a phone call saying that Heather had been injured. She had been riding her bike in the hilly area around her home when a car came out from a side street and hit her, sending her to the ground where she hit her head on the curb.
She was rushed to the local hospital where the news was grave. She had suffered a subdural hematoma, causing severe damage to the left side of the brain, and she was unlikely to survive. The physicians recommended not doing anything and letting her go. Heather’s parents insisted on doing whatever could be done, so the head of neurosurgery at the University of California Irvine was called in who confirmed the bleak prognosis. Never-the-less the neurosurgeon operated and removed most of the damaged left side of the brain.
Heather survived the surgery but remained in a semi-cognitive spastic state. She was able to breathe and swallow on her own with little sign of recognition of whom she saw for nearly 30 years until her death a few years ago. She was never able to speak, and several years passed before she showed any signs of recognizing her parents. She was unable to do anything for herself.
Throughout all of this time she was showered with love and affection by her family who, for the first half of her remaining time took care of her at home. Her room was equipped with a special lifting device that enabled her caretaker and parents to get her from her bed and into the bath.
Every year, the family Christmas card included a photo of the whole family at the beach with Heather in the middle in her wheelchair. Heather never lacked for anything and was always surrounded by prayer and her Christian family until the day she passed into the presence of her Savior Jesus Christ where she is singing and dancing while she waits for her family to join her.
The love, care and Christian witness have been an inspiration to all of us who have walked this walk with them.
Dick and his wife were the first people we met when we moved into our Redondo Beach, Calif., apartment in July 1965. They were strong Christians who became part of our church couples’ group. About eight years ago they stayed with us for a few days and while they were here Dick noticed he was starting to trip when walking on our beach. He had trouble lifting his foot. Our family physician, sent him to a neurologist who confirmed his suspicion that Dick had shown the first signs of Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS – Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), also known as Motor Neuron Disease in the United Kingdom.
ALS is a progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in the spinal cord and brain controlling the muscles in the body, leading to eventual death, usually in three to five years. Rarely, survival can be as long as 30 years.
Dick was showered with love and attention to the very end from his wife and their church family. When Dick’s helper was with him, she turned to his wife and said “he’s going.” She was there hugging him as he departed this world.
Stephen was a PhD student about a few years behind Allen Metherell (Alex’s brother). Allen had received his PhD in physics at Cambridge University in England. Allen had become a lecturer and later a fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge.
Stephen was a very bright mathematician in theoretical physics and a very promising doctoral candidate. Very soon after starting his postgraduate work he started developing neuromuscular problems that were diagnosed as ALS and was told he probably had only two or three years to live. Allen knew Stephen and watched him grow more debilitated as the condition developed much more slowly than expected. He has lived with the disease for more than 30 years, and his disease is now thought to be condition closely related to ALS called Spinal Muscular Dystrophy type IV.
This has been very fortunate, for Stephen, or Stephen Hawking as the world knows him, is arguably the most brilliant theoretical physicist in the world.
He, along with Roger Penrose and George Ellis, wrote a seminal paper extending Einstein’s theory of relativity to include the dimension of time. He is reputed to have told his then wife who is an evangelical Episcopalian that he proved that time had a beginning, (along with space, energy and matter). She replied that he didn’t discover it; God wrote about that already in 1 Corinthians 2:7, which states that “No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.”
Undeterred, Stephen remains an agnostic in spite of his brilliance and in spite of evidence he has seen of God’s majestic, exquisite design, and God’s fine tuning of every physical parameter in the universe.
He has just stepped down (as required at the age of 68) from one of the oldest and most prestigious professorships in the world, the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics that he has held since 1979. This position was founded in 1663 and was occupied by Sir Isaac Newton among other great scientists. Although no longer chairman of mathematics he continues his research unabated in Cambridge.
Heather, Dick and Stephen, though from different circumstances have been loved, valued and cherished when more “rational” people would judge that it would have been more useful
to society and those near them had they been allowed to die sooner rather than later. Each of them has through their adversity contributed greatly to this world in their own way.
Heather and Dick have shown the power of love to their family, friends and community.
Stephen has given to the world a better understanding of the exquisite fine-tuning of this ten-space-time dimensional universe that God has created just so life can exist for a short period of time while He works out His plan. Stephen had the eyes to see this, although he did not have the faith to recognize the One who ordered it. This entire universe, which is rapidly expanding at an ever increasing rate, will eventually die and go out of existence. God will make a “new heaven and a new earth” for us, which will be far better than anything that we can imagine.
2 Peter 3:13 But in keeping with His promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.
Revelation 21:1-2 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
Health care reform currently being contemplated by the U.S. Congress will significantly change the dynamics of cases like these. We do not yet know what the final details will be; but we do know that its authors are tending toward a single universal system designed to reduce costs and modeled after the Canadian and British National Health Service systems.
Any system that is designed to reduce cost will inevitably restrict the access to care. Reduced payments for diagnostic testing such as CT and MRI scans, nuclear medicine diagnostic procedures and technologically complicated diagnostic laboratory testing will have two effects: First the number that will be made available to patients will be restricted, and second, the availability of funding for further development of technology will be greatly slowed down.
The argument that it will lead to a fairer distribution of health care is false. Experience in places where this system has been attempted tells us otherwise. We only need look at how the National Health Service in the United Kingdom works. Stephen Hawking praises the NHS for keeping him alive. The NHS is great if you are someone of distinction, position or potential as Hawking was when he was diagnosed with his condition as a promising doctoral candidate in Cambridge. Nothing has been spared to keep him alive and well in the British system.
On the other hand, if you are a retired travelling salesman, as Pam’s father Norman Barrass was, the opposite is true. When Norman just turned 70 Alex found he had a loud aortic valve stenosis heart sound. Nothing was done for him by the NHS. A few years later he was finally scheduled to have a coronary angiogram but while waiting for it, he suffered a small heart attack. The study was never rescheduled and he died four years later from a massive coronary. In our family’s experience, the health care provided by the NHS was inadequate and very unevenly distributed.
The millions of uninsured
There is some argument about the number, but, whatever the number is, it is not because Medicare and/or Medicaid is not available them. Most who do not sign up for them either don’t know that they can, or they do not want to. They may be illegal aliens, which does not affect their ability to get the benefits. They just do not want to get in the system. When the uninsured show up in an emergency department and are hospitalized, the hospital usually signs them up so that they can be paid. It would be helpful to institute a program whereby the uninsured can get the Medicaid ahead of their needs. That way they can seek clinic or general practice physician help for problems that are not so urgent that an emergency department visit is needed.
Pam’s mother Sylvia Barrass left the United Kingdom to join us a couple of years after Norman had died. She immediately signed up for Medicare Part B (doctor and prescription coverage). Here on a Permanent Resident “green card” she was not eligible for Medicare Part A, so she signed up for MediCal (the California equivalent of Medicaid) that covers hospitalization.
When she was 92 she was visiting Pam’s sister, Wendy, in Florida, when she fell and broke her hip, and was immediately hospitalized. She underwent surgery to repair the hip fracture, which was risky at her age. She was moved to a nursing home where about a week later she fell and rebroke the same hip. She was sent back to the same hospital, and the surgeon repaired the new fracture. A few weeks later she returned to her home in California.
Her entire medical care and hospitalization did not cost her a penny.
Last Christmas, still living on her own at age 98, she became very weak, so we admitted her again into a hospital near us. She was stabilized, sent into a local nursing home and finally back home. She is now enjoying an extended stay in Florida with Wendy. They both go out regularly and eat English fish and chips loaded with salt! She will turn 99 years old on Christmas Day. We can’t wait to enjoy fish and chips with her for her birthday.
Unlike other countries, our health care system provides the best care possible for all of the people all of the time regardless of race, rank or reputation.
Heath care reform and social security
The Social Security System is running out of money fast.
An obvious way to rescue Social Security is to minimize the availability of health care to seniors.
Rescuing Social Security will be a result of reducing the average life span of elderly Americans so that fewer Social Security checks have to be sent out. A reduction in the average life span of Americans could save billions of dollars annually in Social Security payments over and above the additional savings in medical care expenses.
As believers we should abhor any system that discriminates against the elderly. We are taught that we should respect and care for the elderly.
1 Timothy 5:8 If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
This should not only apply to our own lives, but also to what we do collectively as a country.
This should not only apply to our own lives, but also to what we do collectively as a country.
The role of the Church and Christians
Christians are called to set an example to love and to care for the sick, the elderly and the very young, including the unborn. Abortion, discrimination in providing care for people of any rank or standing and failing to care for the elderly is anathema to people of the faith.
We are seeing a developing health care plan that is very similar to that which was proposed under President Bill Clinton in which all women would have been required to have prenatal ultrasound exams.
In the “Hillary Care” plan as it was known, if the ultrasound showed any question of fetal abnormality and the woman chose NOT to have an abortion, then the delivery and medical care for the child would be excluded from the plan. This would place a huge financial burden on the women. In other words, that government plan would coerce her to choose an abortion.
This, and the obvious affect on the elderly, makes the current proposals unacceptable.
The system of health care we have now is working well compared to what other countries have. Some changes should be done that will further improve it. Among other things, the poor and those with low incomes who are currently eligible for Medicaid should be
signed up so that they can get the full benefits of the panoply of services that are currently available.