Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this amendment. This will improve the bill. I am very concerned, as a physician, that this bill will do great harm to the practice of medicine. This is micromanaging the palliative care of the dying.

So I strongly support this amendment because it will remove the severe penalties and the threats. Physicians are accustomed to practicing with lawyers over their shoulders. Now we are going to add another DEA agent over our shoulders to watch what we do.

It is said, well, there is not going to be any change in law. Well, if there is not, why the bill? Certainly there is a change in law. This bill does not state that it is dealing with euthanasis. It says it is a pain relief promotion act.

Generally speaking, I look at the names of bills and sometimes intentionally and sometimes just out of the way things happen here, almost always the opposite happens from the bill that we raise up. So I would call this the pain promotion act. I really sincerely believe, as a physician, that this will not help.

Too often physicians are intimidated and frightened about giving the adequate pain medication that is necessary to relieve pain. This amendment will be helpful. This is what we should do. We should not intimidate. The idea of dealing with the issue of euthanasis, euthanasia is killing. It is murder.

I am pro-life. I am against abortion. I am absolutely opposed to euthanasis. But euthanasis is killing. Under our Constitution, that is a State issue, not a congressional issue.

I strongly urge the passage of this amendment.

• Mr. Chairman, today Congress will take a legislative step which is as potentially dangerous to protecting the sanctity of life as was the Court’s ill-advised Roe versus Wade decision.
• The Pain Relief Promotion Act of 1999, H.R. 2260, would amend Title 21, United States Code, for the laudable goal of protecting palliative care patients from the scourge of ‘assisted’ suicide. However, by preempting what is the province of States–most of which have already enacted laws prohibiting ‘assisted suicide’–and expanding its use of the Controlled Substances Act to further define what constitutes proper medical protocol, the federal government moves yet another step closer to both a federal medical bureau and a national police state.
• Our federal government is, constitutionally, a government of limited powers. Article one, section eight, enumerates the legislative areas for which the U.S. Congress is allowed enact legislation. For every other issue, the federal government lacks any authority or consent of the governed and only the state governments, their designees, or the people in their private market actions enjoy such rights to governance. The tenth amendment is brutally clear in stating ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ Our nation’s history makes clear that the U.S. Constitution is a document intended to limit the power of central government. No serious reading of historical events surrounding the creation of the Constitution could reasonably portray it differently.
• In his first formal complaint to Congress on behalf of the federal Judiciary, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said ‘the trend to federalize crimes that have traditionally been handled in state courts . . . threatens to change entirely the nature of our federal system.’ Rehnquist further criticized Congress for yielding to the political pressure to ‘appear responsive to every highly publicized societal ill or sensational crime.’
• However, Congress does significantly more damage than simply threatening physicians with penalties for improper prescription of certain drugs–it establishes (albeit illegitimately) the authority to dictate the terms of medical practice and, hence, the legality of assisted suicide nationwide. Even though the motivation of this legislation is clearly to pre-empt the Oregon Statute and may be protective of life in this instance, we mustn’t forget that the saw (or scalpel) cuts both ways. The Roe versus Wade decision–the Court’s intrusion into rights of states and their previous attempts to protect by criminal statute the unborn’s right not to be aggressed against–was quite clearly less protective of life than the Texas statute it obliterated. By assuming the authority to decide for the whole nation issues relating to medical practice, palliative care, and assisted suicide, the foundation is established for a national assisted suicide standard which may not be protective of life when the political winds shift and the Medicare system is on the verge of fiscal collapse. Then, of course, it will be the federal government’s role to make the tough choices of medical procedure rationing and for whom the cost of medical care doesn’t justify life extension. Current law already prohibits private physicians from seeing privately funded patients if they’ve treated a Medicaid patient within two years.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 1999 at 3:14 am and is filed under Speeches and Statements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.