Having read letters from some of your readers, who are opposed to assisted suicide for terminally ill patients who desperately want to end their suffering, I believe their concerns are misplaced.
It is far more worrisome for me to know that insurance companies are not covering testing for possible early diagnoses because, though a person might have symptoms, “odds are” that you don’t have the condition in question. Such statistics about the likelihood of testing positive for a condition or disease is acceptable and practical…as long as it is someone else’s loved one.
Concerns about medical costs becoming a reason to pressure the terminally ill into ending their lives have been proven unfounded through experience in other states and other countries, whereas the denial of potentially life-saving tests due to cost seems far more likely to me.
Cost is the real killer.
Shelley Dunn
Portland
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