In 2008 Oregon Health Plan refused to pay four thousand dollars per month for Barbara Wagner to receive chemotherapy, but they would pay for her to receive prescriptions to end her life. “ To say to someone we’ll pay for you to die, but not for you to live; it’s cruel,” says Barbara. Doctors should not be giving out medication, at the patients request, under the Death with Dignity Act, to help end the patient's life. Physician-assisted suicide, the act that makes it legal, and the doctors that take part, are all topics I want want to make people more aware of after reading this essay.

Suicide, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide are three very similar ways to die. Taken from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, “suicide is the act of taking your own life because you do not want to continue living.” The word suicide comes from the Latin term “suicidium,” from “sui caedere,” meaning “to kill oneself.” There are many reasons for people to commit suicide. They might consider it if they are depressed, frequent drug or alcohol users, or if they are under a significant amount of stress. When most people commit suicide they don’t think about the effects it will have on their family, so why when a person requests a doctor to help them end their life should it be any different? The word euthanasia comes from “euthanatos.” The “eu” meaning well or good and “thanatos” meaning easy death. When a person undergoes euthanasia, a doctor gives them a lethal injection. But euthanasia is not legal in any states, and with that not being legal, people found a different way to help end a patient's life. Unlike suicide, where a person ends their own life, physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is where a doctor prescribes death-inducing medication and the patient administers it, with direct or indirect assistance from the physician, to end their own life. The definition of physician-assisted suicide, derived from Oxford dictionaries is, “the suicide of a patient suffering from an incurable disease, affected by the taking of lethal drugs provided by a doctor for this purpose.” PAS is only legal in four states: Oregon, Washington, Vermont via passed legislative vote and Montana via court rulings. Other states, such as Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts, and California, have tried to pass laws to legalize physician-assisted suicide, but have had no luck.

Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act in 1994, and Washington followed fourteen years later. In layman’s terms, the Death with Dignity Act states that, any legal resident of the state, over the age of eighteen, and person(s) with less than six months to live, may participate in physician-assisted suicide under the Death with Dignity Act. The act does not require the doctor, who prescribed the medication, to be present when the patient administers it. According to the Oregon Public Health Division, as of 1997 a total of one thousand one hundred and seventy-three patients have participated in the act, and of those only seven hundred and fifty-three have actually died. Why have this legal if it’s not one hundred percent effective? And shouldn't the doctors always be there when it is administered?

According to Susan W. Enouen, P.E, author of the article “Oregon’s Euthanasia Law”, “only around 30% of the physicians, since 2001, have been present when the patients administered the drug. Even though the doctors are not allowed to administer the drug, some still decide to “help” the patients inject it if there are complications. Even with the complications, the doctor is still not supposed to help the patients because, when the patient dies it could be considered murder. And, because of the Death with Dignity act, the doctor would not be penalized.

I hope after reading this everyone is more aware of why physician-assisted suicide should not be allowed. The Death with Dignity Act, or others similar to it, should not be passed in any other states. Like Barbara Wagner, I think that it’s flat-out cruel for some healthcare plans not to pay for lifesaving treatments. If they feel that we should pay for it ourselves, maybe they should first look into how much it costs or come up with better ways to help the financially distressed pay for it. The “right to die” is just a saying, it is not a civil right stated anywhere except in our heads.