Just so that Joseph doesn't feel like he's the only person panicking in Chicken Little fashion...

The Washington Post reports that the President's health care team has looked to Green Bay and La Crosse, Wis., to find out how those cities have been containing their health care costs so much better than the rest of the nation:

In the final two years of a patient's life, for example, they found that Medicare spent an average of $46,412 per beneficiary nationwide, with the typical patient spending 19.6 days in the hospital, including 5.1 in the intensive-care unit. Green Bay patients cost $33,334 with 14.1 days in the hospital and just 2.1 days in the ICU, while in Miami and Los Angeles, the average cost of care exceeded $71,000, and total hospitalization was about 28 days with 12 in the ICU.

Sounds impressive, right?  Lots of savings.  I wondered, "Did they just refuse people treatment, or what?"  Turns out it's a little worse than that:

Much of the evidence suggests that the more doctors, more drugs, more tests and more therapies given to patients, the worse they fare -- and the unhappier they become, said Donald Berwick, president of the independent research group Institute of Quality Improvement.

That has been the case at Gundersen Lutheran Health System in La Crosse, Wis., which has spending patterns comparable to Green Bay's. Persuading patients to sign medical directives and using electronic medical records to alert doctors and nurses, for example, the health system has dramatically reduced the intrusive, expensive end-of-life procedures that often drive up costs but rarely stave off death for long, said chief executive Jeffrey E. Thompson.   [emphasis added]

I'm concerned about the words "medical directives," especially in the context of finding savings in end-of-life care and the whole tone of the article.  When you put these together, it seems to me that they're basically talking about a form of assisted suicide that's legal in all 50 states: the "living will."

Catholic site Evangelization Station says, "The living will -- sometimes called a "directive" or a "declaration" -- is downright dangerous. It actually gives power over your life and death to an unknown physician."  According to an article on Zenit, "The standard living-will documents that are advocated by those who support euthanasia have a general presumption for death."  The International Task Force in Steubenville, OH, says, "The living will is the oldest type of advance directive....  Most living wills instruct an attending physician to withhold or withdraw medical interventions from its signer if he has a terminal condition or is in a permanent vegetative state. Since the document is so vague and the attending physician may be unfamiliar with the signer's views and values, the document can be interpreted by the physician in a manner that was not intended by its signer."  I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

And what about that other word in bold, "persuading?"  Here's a snip of a column from Charlotte Allen of the Washington Post, describing her experience with breast cancer:

Whether to have a living will is presumably up to the patient. But I've developed a sneaking suspicion that someone else may be hoping to call the shots. After three attempts to induce me either to sign up or to state my refusal to do so in writing, I had to wonder how voluntary a living will really is in many cases. In my case, I started to feel ever-so-slightly harassed.

When I showed up at the hospital for some pre-surgery medical tests, one of the receptionist's first questions was, "Do you have a living will?" The form she gave me after I shook my head was as complicated as a tax return. There were numerous boxes for me to check specifying a range of conditions under which I might like to have a Do Not Resuscitate order hung over my hospital bed, whether I would want to be denied "artificial" food and water under some circumstances, what I thought about being taken off a ventilator, and so forth.

Sometimes I just feel like screaming, "Wake up!" to the world.

Most Catholics, I'm sorry to say, rolled over and played dead when In Vitro Fertilization came in the late '70's.  Now, it's advertised on the radio with money-back guarantees.

We rolled over when the first "living will" movement came, too.  In the end, we basically said, "If you're Catholic, don't get one," and left it at that.

But we can't roll over on this one.  If I'm right about what's going on in Green Bay and La Crosse, Wis., and if the Washington Post is right that Obama is looking those cities as models for our nation's health care plans, then we simply have to fight it.

Here's hoping I'm wrong, that I really am more like Chicken Little than Chicken Little himself.  And here's hoping we don't roll over this time.

EDIT: I should note that fellow blogger Todd A. and frequent commenter Francis W. predicted this turn of events earlier this week, in Joseph's comments section.