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Friday, March 29, 2024 - 10:28 AM

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

First Published in 1994

INDEPENDENT CONSERVATIVE VOICE OF
UPSTATE SOUTH CAROLINA

When you think you have heard the worst regarding the regime running the U. S. government in Washington, D. C., something else even worse surfaces. The latest is the Death Book for Veterans.

Public exposure of the book came just a few days after President Obama assured a large veteran’s group that he will never cut benefits to veterans. Then on Wednesday, August 19th, the Wall Street Journal published a story by Jim Towey, titled Death Book for Veterans. The story exposed the fact that the Department of Veterans Affairs has published a 51 page end-of-life counseling book titled, Your Life, Your Choices.

Fox News reported that the author the VA paid to write the book is a well-known advocate of end of life strategies including assisted suicide. Towey, who wrote the Wall Street Journal article, as an advisor to the administration of President George W. Bush, had discovered the book that in its original version referred veterans to the Hemlock Society who were bound to a wheel chair, unable to “shake the blues” or have concluded that they are a “financial burden on my family.” Towey was able to get the book pulled from use by the Department of Veterans Affairs at that time. He told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that “the message of the workbook is clear: hurry up and die. When government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude that life is not worth living – who needs death panels?”

Death panels is a term used by former Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin to describe the Obama Administration health care plan end of life provisions included in HR 3200, the 1,300 page House bill.

With the arrival of the Obama administration in January of 2009, the book surfaced again in Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics. Last month a memorandum directed to Veterans Affairs Department employees urged them to make Your Life, Your Choices available to veterans.

The workbook portion of the book actually has choices for the veteran to check off and, in the words of Towey, tends to “push veterans in the direction of pulling the plug.”

Wallace also interviewed Tammy Duckworth, assistant secretary of the VA, who refused to be interviewed along with Towey. She insisted that Your Life, Your Choices workbook is just one of many reference tools the VA makes available and that the workbook is currently being revised.

The 51-page end-of-life counseling book is still displayed on the Department of Veterans Affairs website.

Pennsylvania Democrat Senator Arlen Specter, who has been given grief at town hall meetings by many of his constituents, told Fox News Sunday that he thinks the VA book Your Life, Your Choices should be suspended pending hearings in the Senate which he promised he would call for Monday morning.

Congressman Paul Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, also interviewed by Chris Wallace, said the existence of the book “is especially telling of the direction we are going in America.”

As opposition to the president’s health care plan intensifies and his popularity continues to sink, he is taking a 10-day vacation at a $35,000 a week rented compound in Martha’s Vineyard. The compound is in the midst of the elite liberal wealthy clans who think they know what is best for their fellow Americans and would like to be beneficiaries and insiders in a socialist dictatorship that has been a vision of theirs for decades and they hope their man can consummate before the year ends.

Some in the media, even locally, are creating confusion by attacking the critics of government involvement in end-of-life decisions. They fail to understand that government, especially one in a financial crisis has compelling reasons to withhold costly medical care to elderly and infirm individuals. Government has no moral, ethical or constitutional authority to be involved in such personal decisions in a constitutional republic.

 

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