California residents are feeling the damaging effects of the state’s doctor-prescribed suicide law less than a year after the deadly procedure became legal.
Wife and mother of four Stephanie Packer is one of them.
In an interview with Orange County Catholic, the young, terminally ill mom said her state Medicare plan initially refused to pay for her medical treatment but offered to pay for assisted suicide drugs instead.
Packer said she was diagnosed with autoimmune disease scleroderma, a potentially fatal condition, in 2012. Recently, when she talked with a Medicare representative about covering her treatment with a new clinical trial, she said she was refused.
The report continues:
So when Packer followed up with her insurance company in one of many failed attempts to obtain approval for participation in a promising clinical trial, she was flummoxed when a Medicare representative said the company wouldn’t approve the UCLA-based trial, but instead would charge just $1.20 for a medication to end her life.
It was a stark reminder of the far-reaching effect of the physician-assisted suicide bill signed into law in California last year, a law that Packer worked hard to defeat.
“I was just dumbfounded,” Packer recalls. “You won’t give me the medication I need to live but for a buck it’s OK if I go kill myself? I immediately got off the phone and talked to my mother, husband, girlfriends and doctors. True to my generation, I got on Facebook right away.”
http://www.lifenews.com/2017/01/12/...uicide-drugs-refused-me-for-a-clinical-trial/
Wife and mother of four Stephanie Packer is one of them.
In an interview with Orange County Catholic, the young, terminally ill mom said her state Medicare plan initially refused to pay for her medical treatment but offered to pay for assisted suicide drugs instead.
Packer said she was diagnosed with autoimmune disease scleroderma, a potentially fatal condition, in 2012. Recently, when she talked with a Medicare representative about covering her treatment with a new clinical trial, she said she was refused.
The report continues:
So when Packer followed up with her insurance company in one of many failed attempts to obtain approval for participation in a promising clinical trial, she was flummoxed when a Medicare representative said the company wouldn’t approve the UCLA-based trial, but instead would charge just $1.20 for a medication to end her life.
It was a stark reminder of the far-reaching effect of the physician-assisted suicide bill signed into law in California last year, a law that Packer worked hard to defeat.
“I was just dumbfounded,” Packer recalls. “You won’t give me the medication I need to live but for a buck it’s OK if I go kill myself? I immediately got off the phone and talked to my mother, husband, girlfriends and doctors. True to my generation, I got on Facebook right away.”
http://www.lifenews.com/2017/01/12/...uicide-drugs-refused-me-for-a-clinical-trial/
