Originally Posted - May 23, 2006

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If you do not want life-sustaining treatment should you become permanently unconscious, New Hampshire law already provides a way for you to refuse it. It's called a living will. If you want someone else to make those decisions for you, state law already provides for that, too. It's called "durable power of attorney for health care." So why does New Hampshire need a long and complicated new law to address these issues?

The answer is, it does not. Yet that is what House Bill 656 has become.

The bill was supposed to provide a legal outline for the creation of "do not resuscitate orders." Those are legal documents through which people make clear their desire not to be revived in case they stop breathing or their hearts stop beating. But its sponsors and supporters have a much broader agenda, which they hide behind the "do not resuscitate" angle. They want to make it much, much easier for life-sustaining treatment to be denied patients who cannot make decisions for themselves - even if those patients are only temporarily incapacitated. And that is exactly what the bill, in its final form approved by conference committee last week, does.

Were the bill merely a short revision of the law to create a statutory provision for "do not resuscitate" orders, it would be fine. Instead, it redefines two critical medical concepts - "permanently unconscious" and "near death" - making each definition troublingly broad, gives physicians and even nurses more authority than they should have to determine whether a person lives or dies, and tips the law in favor of death. If this bill becomes law, a nurse - with no involvement whatsoever from a physician - could classify a patient as lacking the "capacity to make health care decisions."

That determination sets in motion a series of decisions that could result in the denial of life-sustaining treatment. All of those decisions could rest on a single medical determination made without even the consultation of a physician, much less the attending physician. Other key medical determinations also could be made without the involvement of the attending physician.

HB 656 is a monstrosity that needs to be killed. It devalues human life and treats far too lightly the important decisions that have to be made on behalf of patients who, either permanently or temporarily, lack the ability to make health care decisions on their own. 5-23-06

© 2006 North Country Gazette