Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a new California law legalizing physician-assisted suicide. The national impact of the new law in our nation’s largest state will be enormous. California follows Oregon, Washington, and Vermont in providing legislative approval for physician-assisted suicide. There are several chilling outcomes from this odious law.

Physician-assisted suicide is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath — “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan” — and an egregious violation of the fundamental moral tenet of medical practice: do no harm. A physician who kills a patient deliberately is not, in that capacity, acting as a physician. Intentional homicide is the antithesis of medical practice.

Physician-assisted suicide also gradually degrades the quality of medical care given to people with terminal illnesses, as has been documented in Europe in nations that have assisted-suicide laws. The legal endorsement of the concept “Hurry up and get it over with” has an inhibiting effect on compassionate care of the terminally ill.

The third consequence of the new law is the most tangible. Physician-assisted suicide will, in short order, come to be seen as a cost-savings approach in medical economics. Most medical expenses over a person’s lifetime are incurred in the last several months of life. As physician-assisted suicide comes to be viewed as a perfectly valid and accepted option for management of the terminally ill, it will come in short order to be seen as the most desirable option for many patients, in no small part because it will save a great deal of money. The savings will accrue to insurance companies and to the government, who will put not-so-subtle pressure on physicians to guide their patients and their families toward the most, shall we say, “efficient” management of their terminal illness.

There are enormous financial savings to be made in encouraging patients to accept physician-assisted suicide. It is na�ve to deny that this will play an important role in medical decisions in the near future. Already there is a sense in the medical profession that pressure is being brought to bear on physicians to shorten length of hospital stay for patients, because a short length of stay substantially improves profit margins in our system in which medical care is reimbursed at a constant rate for each diagnosis irrespective of duration of hospitalization.

Physician-assisted suicide is a moral catastrophe for the medical profession and for our society. The danger to patients’ lives posed by this law is made much greater by the impact on medical economics. You must understand it in light of this fact: You will save other people — people in very powerful positions to influence and control your medical care — enormous amounts of money by dying sooner rather than later.

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