Washington Post Promotes Death Counselling-THERE IS EVIDENCE IT SAVES MONEY!

August 15, 2009 (LPAC)—When their master speaks, they jump. That's the way you have to see the recent coverage of the "health care debate" in the Washington Post and the New York Times. In its second editorial today, the Post comes to the defense of the pro-euthanasia policy called death counseling—and chortles that it even saves money!

After a hearty endorsement of the policy, which has already been incorporated into hospital practice in the United States, of getting young people to sign end-of-life directives, the Post gets to the point:

"The issue of end-of-life planning should never get mixed in with the issue of cost control in health care. Such planning is a virtue, as we said, in itself. Cost control is a virtue, too, but not to be achieved by persuading people to limit their end-of-life care. Tucking the measure in question into a bill that focuses substantially on controlling costs may have been a mistake....

"As it happens, there is evidence, though inconclusive, that advanced directives might save some costs. A study of 603 patients with advanced stages of cancer, published this year by Harvard researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, found that the final week of health costs for those who had discussed end-of-life treatment with their doctors was 36 percent lower than for those who did not have such talks."

But that's not the most important finding, the Post concludes. People who didn't have those end-of-life discussions "had a worse 'quality of life' in the final week," and failing to push those discussions, "could have the effect of consigning more patients to unnecessarily uncomfortable deaths."

As for the New York Times, it ran a near-full page promo for the Dartmouth project yesterday, and today fulsomely lies about the origin of the Obama Mustache photo. What do you expect?