Do Not Suffer This ‘Pain Relief’ Bill

Sen. Orrin Hatch’s Pain Relief Promotion Act is aimed at discouraging terminally ill patients from committing assisted suicide to escape intractable pain, a practice that Oregon voters approved in 1994 and other states have since considered.

But the Utah Republican’s bill, which the Senate will consider Thursday, is hardly true to its name. Its broad provisions, far from improving palliative care, could in fact discourage doctors from effectively treating pain, and it should be defeated.

Hatch’s bill is an amended version of legislation introduced last year by Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) that was shelved after physicians complained about its draconian punishments. It called for a 20-year prison sentence for “assisting another person in causing death.”

The Hatch version adds some phrases to reassure doctors, but the harsh sanctions remain and the inserted phrases merely make the bill a contradictory muddle. For instance, the bill claims not to “alter the roles of the federal and state governments in regulating the practice of medicine,” but then goes on to do just that, declaring that “the attorney general shall give no force and effect to state law authorizing or permitting assisted suicide or euthanasia.”

Hatch’s bill would effectively require the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to determine whether physicians are appropriately prescribing pain medications. That is a task that, as the DEA admitted in a letter to Congress last month, it “lacks the resources or the expertise” to do.

There’s also no evidence that doctors are over-medicating patients to hasten their deaths. On the contrary, the few studies that do exist indicate that under-medication of the terminally ill is more of a problem. For instance, a 1998 New York state task force on pain management polled 3,000 physicians and found 71% admitting that they had under-medicated patients for pain to avoid being punished by state medical boards.

The Hatch bill does one useful thing: It provides a one-time, $5-million grant for research into pain management. That’s a paltry sum given that the nation spends billions of dollars each year on end-of-life care. Yet such studies, not threats of harsh punishment, are the best way of discouraging assisted suicide.