Thanks and Tampa Tribune today (should be on line) is putting the issue of killing disabled people who have no living will is ON THE BACK BURNER. They all agreed. That means that Dave Simmons was untruthful in his press release about investigating George Greer. Dave Simmons is on my back burner... GO FEDS!!!
this is why when it was said and done Bush didn't do anything and this is why George doesn't want to do anything cause he knows Jeb supported the law that killed Terri.
Also, in October 2003(Terri's feeding tube was removed in Ocotber 2003 for 6 days) Jeb Bush asked Thomas More Law Center to look into the facts and the law of Terri's case. They did and not only adivised Jeb to intervene based on the facts and circumstances of the case, but gave him the laws which stated he could intervene.
I also read President George Bush signed similar laws, to the ones Jeb Bush signed, in Texas.
"I've been doing research on when food and water became a life-prolonging procedure and who was Governor at the time."
http://www.nhwg.org/downloads/hospicesummary2.01.pdf
This seems relevant, FR_addict. The report put out by the National Hospice Work Group was published in 2003, but the criteria for "Expanding Boundaries - Overcoming Barriers" must have been in the works for some time. This summary does mention withholding food and water as well as redefining "terminal illness" and changing regulations regarding time limits for hospice admissions. We are much further down the euthanasia path than we knew, which is why the execution of Terri Shaivo is such a shock. Apparently some have been working diligently to make it all "legal."
Some quotes:
"Policymakers should act immediately to bring about policy reform of the absolute application of an individual’s prognosis as a primary criterion for reimbursement of services. The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and its contract fiscal intermediaries should take steps to protect hospices, referring physicians
and patients from regulatory misinterpretations by establishing a statistically accurate definition of terminal prognosis. Such a definition would recognize the relevance of prognosis as a population measure, not an individual one, consistent with the wide literature addressing the fallibility of medical prognostication on individual patients." (Some people take longer to ki... uh, die than others.)
"CMS and state departments of health should also adopt a common survey process for hospice patients in nursing homes so that patients’ wishes for end-of-life care are not subordinated to clinically and personally harmful regulatory requirements such as the enforcement of feedings among dying patients." (So, what will the default policy be? Notice the framing of "feeding" as the enforcement of a "harmful regulatory requirement.")
National Hospice Work Group - Expanding Boundaries
National Hospice Work Group ^ | March-April 2003 | Bruce Jennings, et al
Posted on 04/02/2005 12:31:18 AM PST by Liberty Reigns
Access to Hospice Care: Expanding Boundaries, Overcoming Barriers, a report drawn from a three-year study of hospice access and values issues conducted by The Hastings Center and the National Hospice Work Group, a voluntary association of progressive hospices, was published as a Special Supplement accompanying the March/April 2003 issue of the bioethics journal, the Hastings Center Report...
The report also offers a new vision of hospice, one that holds firm to many of the traditions and values of the past but finds new and more flexible ways to deliver care. The model of traditional hospice care as an independent and specialized service will gradually be transformed into a more comprehensive model in which hospice becomes the coordinating center for a range of services and types of expertise that can be accessed by patients. In the authors’ new vision, America’s hospices will play an expanded role in addressing more of the supportive and symptom relief needs of patients confronting life-limiting illnesses and their families for longer periods and in a wider variety of settings and contexts...
To achieve this ambitious goal, policies must change and powerful cultural taboos surrounding death and dying must be overcome. What’s needed are a national program of professional education about hospice and palliative care and a massive social marketing campaign regarding hospice programs’abilities to address and resolve many of the most widely held fears about the end of life...
(Excerpt) Read more at nhwg.org ...