TOTALLY GEEKED!

This is what leftist medicine has wrought:

A terminally ill woman in California had coverage for her chemotherapy treatment denied by her insurance company, but they’ll gladly pay for her to commit suicide.

The new California law permits physician-assisted suicide, and as a result, it appears that insurance companies have found a great cost-saving measure: kill their sickest patients.

Stephanie Packer, a wife with four children, was diagnosed with a terminal form of scleroderma. She said her insurance company initially told her it would cover he switching to a different chemotherapy drug at the advice of her doctors, The Washington Times is reporting.

For a while, five months or so, we’ve been trying to get me on a different chemotherapy drug for the infusions, because my doctor felt that it would be less toxic than some of the other drugs that we were going to be using,” Ms. Packer said in a video distributed by The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network on Monday.

But shortly after California’s “End of Life Option Act” went into effect – authorizing doctors to diagnose a fatal dose of medication with a prognosis of six months or less to live, Packer’s insurance company quickly reversed themselves and denied the request:

“And when the law was passed, it was a week later I received a letter in the mail saying they were going to deny coverage for the chemotherapy that we were asking for,” Ms. Packer said.

She said she called her insurance company to find out why her coverage had been denied. On the call, she also asked whether suicide pills were covered under her plan.

“And she says, ‘Yes, we do provide that to our patients, and you would only have to pay $1.20 for the medication,’” Packer said.

Packer said the doctors have twice appealed the decision, but to no avail. The new assisted-suicide law creates a huge incentive for insurance companies to deny expensive drugs to terminally ill patients. The cheapest option is to kill them.

All of this comes as other states and areas are considering their own “assisted suicide” bills. Oregon has a “Death with Dignity” act, and the D.C. City council is considering permitting physician-assisted suicide.

After the right-to-die movement began garnering national attention, Ms. Packer said she noticed a change in tone at her support groups for terminally ill patients. While the meetings were formerly positive and encouraging, she said the specter of suicide now hangs above them like a dark cloud.

“And people, once they became depressed, it became negative, and it started consuming people,” she said in the video. “And then they said, ‘You know what? I wish I could just end it.’”