Grassley voted for end-of-life counseling in 2003
by desmoinesdem, Fri Aug 14, 2009 at 01:09:15 PM EDT
Via the Iowa Senate blog, I saw this post by Amy Sullivan at Time magazine's Swampland blog. She re-read the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, which passed with the votes of most Republicans, including Senator Chuck Grassley:
Anyone want to guess what it provided funding for? Did you say counseling for end-of-life issues and care? Ding ding ding!!Let's go to the bill text, shall we? "The covered services are: evaluating the beneficiary's need for pain and symptom management, including the individual's need for hospice care; counseling the beneficiary with respect to end-of-life issues and care options, and advising the beneficiary regarding advanced care planning." The only difference between the 2003 provision and the infamous Section 1233 that threatens the very future and moral sanctity of the Republic is that the first applied only to terminally ill patients. Section 1233 would expand funding so that people could voluntarily receive counseling before they become terminally ill.
At his Winterset town-hall meeting on Wednesday, Grassley said this:
You shouldn't have counseling at the end of life. You ought to have it done 20 years before you're going to die. You ought to plan these things out. I don't have any problem with things like living wills, but they ought to be done within the family. We should not have a government program that determines you're going to pull the plug on grandma."
Some of the current draft health care reform bills would cover counseling to help people create living wills before they ever get sick, which is what Grassley says should happen. In contrast, the 2003 bill he voted for only covered such counseling for people who were already terminally ill.
How interesting that Grassley only recently, under fire from conservative Republicans, decided that counseling on end-of-life options might allow someone "to decide grandma's lived too long."
By the way, Grassley convinced Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus to drop the end-of-life provisions from that committee's draft bill. I didn't think it was possible for Baucus to prove himself to be any more of a tool for Republicans. Talk about negotiating from a position of weakness. I hope Howard Dean is right in predicting that those provisions will be restored in the final version of the bill.
UPDATE: Representative Bruce Braley (IA-01) and Grassley issued dueling statements on this issue today, and I've posted those at Bleeding Heartland.
Tags: 2010 elections, Bob Krause, Chuck Grassley, death panels, end-of-life counseling, euthanasia, health care reform, Howard Dean, IA-Sen, Iowa, Max Baucus, Senate, Tom Fiegen (all tags)
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