Has the Hospice Avoided the Appearance of a Conflict of Interests? I guess the answer to that depends upon who you ask. We note that attorney George Felos is certainly not "unassociated" with the hospice and its board of directors. But did you know that Judge Greer, the judge in this case, was a Pinellas County commissioner for the county back in 1984 through 1992. Guess who also was a county commisioner from 1984 onwards? Hospice Board member Barbara Sheen Todd was elected Pinellas County commisioner back in 1980 and has served in public office since that time, being re-elected several times. It is certain that for the eight years Judge Greer was a county commissioner, he certainly knew hospice board of directors member Barbara Sheen Todd quite well.
This comes from www.hospicepatients.org/A-willingness-to-kill.html -- an article that I found incredibly interesting.
"Felos ... was a founding member of the National Legal Advisors Committee on Choice in Dying, and served as Board Chair of The Hospice of the Florida $uncoast. Where did the phrase "choice in dying" come from? Well, there was an organization called the Euthanasia Society of America which changed its name to "Choice in Dying" which no longer exists - it merged into the "Partnership for Caring" which was founded by Ira Byock, MD. Mary Labyak is corporate Secretary and Treasurer of Partnership for Caring.
What really is the goal of these right-to-kill organizations? They advocate the right to kill the disabled (as in Terri's case), congenitally defective babies (such as Downs syndrome and other children), those with severe cognitive impairment (such as Alzheimer's disease and others), and other unwanted vulnerable patients. One of their main spokesmen, Peter Singer of Princeton does not hesitate to state he wants to kill these people and that any child less than one month old is not a human person. That's how they get around the idea of their killing people: they deny that the person is a "person." If the patient is not a "person," then how can they be killed? ... or something along that circuitous and bankrupt path of logic. The goal is not to only kill a patient in order to relieve their suffering due to extreme pain, since they admit that good palliative care can relieve the pain. No, they only try to legalize killing of patients by fooling the public into believing that relief of uncontrolled pain is their goal. But those who read their writings carefully see glimmers of truth that they can't hide: that they will do anything to achieve their goal, including lying and that their thoughts are very similar to the euthanasia project of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. They are not based in Christian, Jewish or even Islamic thought. Their philosophy is immoral and unspiritually based, though they proclaim they are very "spiritually" motivated. They "know" which patients should be terminated, ... of course, always out of "compassion."