As ThinkProgress reports today, Sarah Palin was for end-of-life counseling before she was against it.
As governor, Palin declared April 16, 2008, “Healthcare Decisions Day,” signing a proclamation to “encourage medical professionals and lawyers to volunteer their time and efforts to … increase the number of Alaska’s citizens with advance directives.”
An advance directive can be a living will, which describes the medical treatments you do or do not want at the end of life, or a power of attorney, which designates someone to make those decisions for you.
Palin has been railing against a provision in the House health care bill which would reimburse doctors for counseling patients about such advance directives. She says that provision really calls for a “death panel,” where government bureaucrats would decide who could get life-extending care based on their usefulness to society. This claim has been thoroughly debunked.
The proclamation was part of National Healthcare Decisions Day, an effort to get more people to plan ahead for end-of-life care. Both houses of Congress and several other states also signed on, and you can see the extensive list of NHDD’s participants here.
More of Palin’s proclamation:
WHEREAS, Healthcare Decisions Day is designed to raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions, related to end of life care and medical decision-making whenever patients are unable to speak for themselves and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important healthcare decisions. […]
WHEREAS, one of the principal goals of Healthcare Decisions Day is to encourage hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, continuing care retirement communities, and hospices to participate in a statewide effort to provide clear and consistent information to the public about advance directives, as well as to encourage medical professionals and lawyers to volunteer their time and efforts to improve public knowledge and increase the number of Alaska’s citizens with advance directives.
WHEREAS, the Foundation for End of Life Care in Juneau, Alaska, and other organizations throughout the United States have endorsed this event and are committed to educating the public about the importance of discussing healthcare choices and executing advance directives.
