Does Ben Carson Have A "Death Panels" Problem?
WASHINGTON : Does Ben Carson have a "death panels" problem?
Before he was a 2016 presidential candidate, Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, frequently raised questions about the high cost of end of life medical care ,and asked whether patients should be able to pursue every available treatment. The statements touched on many of the most sensitive questions about care for the elderly.
"Do people just get to choose on their own, you know, I've been, you know, completely devoid of any mental faculties for 10 years, but want to be kept alive regardless of anything that comes down the pike?" Carson asked at a September 2004 meeting of the President's Council on Bioethics.
When President Obama and congressional Democrats proposed five years later allowing Medicare to pay doctors to talk with elderly patients about their desires and expectations for end of life care, conservatives blasted them for trying to set up "death panels."
But a STAT review of Carson's statements , first as a member of President George W. Bush's bioethics council and later in one of his books , found that the candidate in some ways went further than Obama in calling for society to carefully weigh the value of providing aggressive treatments for the gravely ill.
At a June 2004 meeting of the bioethics council, for instance, Carson wondered whether "we need to make a distinction between just using resources on people who are ill and using resources on people who are terminal." He also noted in September 2005 that the ability to prolong the lives of the elderly has "significant implications in terms of population, and in terms of jobs for the next generation."
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