Abstract

Since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in 2010, public concern persists about health care rationing and the use of quality-of-life criteria in end-of-life counseling by public providers of health care funding. Advisors to the Obama administration have shown an overriding concern for the cost rather than the quality of highly technical interventions in cases of life-threatening illness. In addition, subtle encouragement of physicianassisted suicide has been detected in hospice and long-term-care facilities. Modern advances have made pain control an achievable right. Recognizing the right of patients who are terminally ill to obtain effective pain control is an important factor in the opposition to health care rationing and euthanasia. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.2 (Summer 2013): 237–241.