Those terminally ill patients who have accepted their imminent death cannot prevent their families from plunging into financial debt because they do not have the option of halting the medical bills from piling up. To leave the family in financial ruin is by no means a form of consolation. want to save their relatives the expense of keeping them pointlessly alive. Ronald Dworkin, author of Life’s Dominion, says that “many people.
Of course, most families do not consider the cost while the terminally ill loved-one is still alive.When that loved-one passes away, however, the family has to struggle with a huge hospital bill and are often subject to financial ruin.Most terminal patients want their death to be a peaceful one and with as much consolation as possible. As for the not-so-affluent patients, the cost of their lives is left to their families. Human life is expensive, and in the hospital there are only a few affluent terminal patients who can afford to prolong what life is left in them. has been estimated as ranging from about two thousand to ten thousand dollars a month” (Dworkin 187). A competent dying person has some knowledge of this, and with every day that he or she is kept alive, the hospital costs skyrocket. The cost is sometimes too much for the terminally ill’s family. But, successful or not, medicine has a high price attached to it. Medical technology has failed to save a loved-one. A competent terminal patient must have the option of assisted suicide because it is in the best interest of that person.įurther, a dying person’s physical suffering can be most unbearable to that person’s immediate family. Terminally ill patients should have the right to assisted suicide because it is the best means for them to end the pain caused by an illness which no drug can cure. There are times when pain medication does not suffice”(qtd. According to Kevorkian’s attorney, “ was a pain specialist he could get any kind of pain medication, but he came to Dr. For example, as Ronald Dworkin recounts, Lillian Boyes, an English woman who was suffering from a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, begged her doctor to assist her to die because she could no longer stand the pain (184). Some terminal patients in the past have gone to their doctors and asked for a final medication that would take all the pain away- lethal drugs. Medicine is supposed to alleviate the suffering that a patient undergoes.Yet the only thing that medical technology does for a dying patient is give that patient more pain and agony day after day. For the terminally ill, however, it is just a means of prolonging suffering. For those patients who have a realistic chance of surviving an illness or accident, medical technology is science’s greatest gift to mankind. Respirators can support a patient’s failing lungs and medicines can sustain that patient’s physiological processes. Medical technology today has achieved remarkable feats in prolonging the lives of human beings. But after studying both sides of the issue, a compassionate individual must conclude that competent terminal patients should be given the right to assisted suicide in order to end their suffering, reduce the damaging financial effects of hospital care on their families, and preserve the individual right of people to determine their own fate. For others, however, euthanasia is the act of putting someone to death painlessly, or allowing a person suffering from an incurable and painful disease or condition to die by withholding extreme medical measures.
Euthanasia for some carries a negative connotation it is the same as murder. It is sad to realize that these people are in great agony and that to them the only hope of bringing that agony to a halt is through assisted suicide.When people see the word euthanasia, they see the meaning of the word in two different lights. Many terminally ill patients who are in the final stages of their lives have requested doctors to aid them in exercising active euthanasia.
For many the main concern with assisted suicide lies with the competence of the terminally ill. They differ where they place the line that separates relief from dying-and killing. Physicians are also divided on the issue. Others are for it because of their compassion and respect for the dying. Some are against it because of religious and moral reasons. The debates go back and forth about whether a dying patient has the right to die with the assistance of a physician. The right to assisted suicide is a significant topic that concerns people all over the United States.