Why I haven’t seen this video before, and why it has not gone viral, is beyond me. Listening to this speech, I feel as relieved as I did listening to Reagan in the late 1970s explaining calmly and clearly to the American people how we were being hoodwinked by Continue reading
Category Archives: C-TAC
Former White House health policy advisor: Get the public on board
In case you missed it, this was Chris Dawe last year, shortly after he left the Obama administration, and before he joined Evolent Health — a consulting company founded by the Advisory Board and the Univ. of Pittsburgh Health Plan “to help health systems move towards providing value-based care.” (Advisory Board, which consults for C-TAC, was founded by David Bradley, now Chairman of Atlantic Media.)
Here Dawe is addressing the Campaign to End Unwanted Medical Treatment (which is in fact a campaign to gin up the public to demand less life-saving treatment. Talk about perverse.) Continue reading
Distinction without a difference? Guidance from the NCBC
Last month the National Catholic Bioethics Center posted an article that was meant to guide Catholic clinicians on what to do when a patient or proxy or government requests treatment that the clinician considers to be morally wrong [“Transfer of Care vs. Referral: A Crucial Moral Distinction”]
The subject is important and timely, and I looked forward to reading the piece, but unfortunately it misses the mark when it comes to issues where withholding/withdrawing treatment and palliative care would be involved. Continue reading
Compassion & Choices is funding the American Society on Aging blog
Just a quick nota bene that the current edition of Generations — the journal for the American Society on Aging (ASA) — is posted on ASA’s blog courtesy of funding from Compassion & Choices (the present incarnation of the old Hemlock Society) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
One of the articles is by AARP veteran and Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) co-founder Bill Novelli (“Advanced Illness Care: We Can Do Better“). Continue reading
Scripting “The Conversation”
They’re at it again. NPR hosted another sham debate. On the left we have Ira Byock, hospice and palliative care advocate; and on the far left we have Compassion & Choices, the radical pro-assisted suicide/euthanasia group.
They are debating a subject that no one would have noticed if it weren’t for well-coordinated media hype from MSNBC, People Magazine and the like.
This is a staged “dialogue” on assisted suicide. Compassion & Choices presents the thesis (assisted suicide should be legal), then Ira Byock comes in with a straw man antithesis (traditional medicine will let you suffer) and then the synthesis: palliative care.
Here’s the dirty little secret: Ira Byock is, himself, a euthanasia advocate. Continue reading