p.s.--I've said it before on other issues and will say it again: please vote yes on I-1000, WA, so we midwesterners will follow your lead in another 10 yrs or so.

So here's my question, and it's honestly just a question, I really have no idea what the answer is: If you accept modern medical care, isn't that the risk you take? If you agree to take modern pharmaceuticals, and undergo modern treatments, aren't you choosing the chance of that unnatural death? But maybe some people are going to die a nasty death anyway?

What I would like here, though, is for proponents of the measure to actually address the concerns that opponents of the measure in its current form (like me) have.

I feel like I repeatedly explain to folks that the possibility of people (in our unjust and nonfunctional health care system) being forced into making a choice they don't really want is real and frightening to me, and I can't vote for the measure until I have some reassurance that terminally ill people WON'T be forced into suicide by lack of money or stingy health insurance companies.

All I get in response is another litany of suffering, and statements that everyone who opposes the bill must be an anti-choice fascist monster.
You know what, I know that people suffer. And it sucks. Can we address the concerns some of us have with the WAY this bill attempts to solve the problem, rather than assuming that opposing this bill means wanting the problem to remain unsolved?

My grandmother spent several months in agony living in a hospice. She was well taken care of, but wished to die. She'd wake up every morning and ask her children if she was dead yet. I doubt she'd have chosen to kill herself if asked, but there's no way to know, since she was never offered that option.

The real question, however, is why anyone should have to die a nasty death if they don't want to.

30 years after we create a legal framework for medical suicide, we will be reading horror stories of people "encouraged" into ending their lives by interested parties. Dan and his fellow progressives will be at the vanguard to reform to address the problem their previous reform created, and will be blaming it all on the evil conservatives who aren't willing to share enough of their wealth.

This same script played out over the past 30 years with "de-institutionalization" in place of "death with dignity".

On a seperate thought, @ #12. "De-institutionalization". Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seen to remember under the Reagan Administration large numbers of previously institutionalized people suddenly being on the street due to massive cuts in spending by Reagan. That wasn't some liberal initiative... Does anyone else remember Seattle in the mid-late eighties? There were literally crazy people on damn near every street corner downtown.

Actually, I think what I am saying is mostly that we can look at other places where this has been attempted, and we can see problems that have arisen.
(Exhibit A, Oregon; Exhibit B, Netherlands)

The current initiative does not address those problems.

It's not so much that a bunch of bad things might happen, as that when people have done this in other places, certain specific bad things HAVE happened, and I am not on board with this bill unless we can adjust it to try to prevent those bad things.

Ballard Dude @ 15: Deinstitutionalization was a cause celeb of the left in the 1960s, fueled at the popular level by films like "One Flew Over the Cucuos Nest" and at intellectual level by thinkers like Michel Foucault. The mentally ill were depicted in heroic terms as creative and opressed speaking a kind of truth to power. The idea seemed to be that, if they were released, they would contribute to a less controled, more vibrant, and more diverse society.

A lot of de-institutionalization did happen in the 1980s, but it seems rather odd to blame Reagan: most institutional funding was never at the federal level, a lost of de-institutionalization had already happened in the 1970s, and most of those released were moved into "community-based" care like halfway houses. Yes, that made them more visible to society at large, but that was the left's goal.

I find it interesting to compare anti-abortion arguments with the anti-Death with Dignity argument. They don't want to allow abortions because we have to protect a "child" that can't make its own decision? But they don't want to allow adults to make the decision for themselves? (yes I know this only applies to some of the 'anti-' arguments)

Yeah, I'm sure Foucault had a huge impact on American domestic policy.

It's far more likely that psychiatrists started to realize the complexity of mental illness and the subjectivity of how psychiatrists classify the mentally ill from the sane. Institutionalizing a person for life when he or she is no threat to him/herself or anyone else is unacceptable. Or don't you believe in civil liberties?

yes, the abortion arguments are relevant because they share similar elements: life and death, the potential for pressure, the vulnerability of the central figure who may not be in the best position to resist such pressure. it's useful to draw parallels at times. i wish the abortion debate hysteria hadn't made it in, though. 'let's deny people a civil liberty based on the fear of what they may do with it.'

@9, @12, @21 - if what you're worried about is what *insurance companies* will do to people, what is so complex about addressing that concern? especially in light of the fact, as #21 points out, that insurance companies exist to make a profit and not to serve, which unfairly slants coverage to low cost rather than best effect. REGULATE THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY.

it is unjust, as a matter of public policy, to limit the control people have over their own lives and deaths based only on fear of what they will do with that choice. if you're afraid of pressure, address that. everyone deserves to have control over their bodies, lives, and at the end, their deaths. everyone, without exception.

finally, i'd like to point out that the insurance industry doesn't make any money on the dead. i wonder if our fear is misplaced entirely, here. if you're still getting treated, you're still generating the claims that keep this industry alive. are we sure we should fear them so much? maybe we can panic if we see money for this measure rolling in from the undertakers instead?