Oregon insurer will pay for suicide drugs, not cancer treatment
August 7th, 2008
From ABC News and the [Eugene, Oregon] Register-Guard:
A 64-year-old Oregon woman was notified by her insurer that it would not pay for the $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor had prescribed for her lung cancer. The Oregon Health Plan instead agreed to pay for assisted suicide drugs, at a cost of about $50.
“It was horrible,” Barbara Wagner (above) told ABCNews.com. “I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won’t give you the medication to live.”
Critics of Oregon’s decade-old Death With Dignity Law — the only one of its kind in the nation — have been up in arms over the indignity of her unsigned rejection letter. Even those who support Oregon’s liberal law were upset.
Wagner’s doctor had prescribed the drug Tarceva to slow the cancer’s growth, predicting that it would give her another four to six months of life. The insurance plan declined to fund the drug because it does not meet the “five-year, 5-percent rule” — providing a five percent survival rate after five years.
(Photo from the Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard)
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August 7th, 2008 at 11:49 am
This just reinforces the fact that only terminally ill patients themselves — not the government and not insurance companies — should make their own end-of-life decision. Death with dignity is about having the option of ending suffering if and when you choose.
The Oregonian newspaper has a good editorial on it:
http://www.oregonlive.com/editorials/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1217289319150190.xml&coll=7