Kaiser solicits its doctors to kill for "assisted suicide" Doctors of Death.(Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc.)

Editor's note. This first appeared on National Review Online and is reprinted with the author's permission.

When liberals ask me why they should oppose physician-assisted suicide (PAS), I always reply, "I can summarize a big reason in just three letters: HMO."

That always raises an eyebrow. Liberals hate HMOs.

Then I ask, "Do you know how much it costs for the drugs used in an assisted suicide?" They usually shake their heads, no. Answering my own question, I say, "About forty bucks," adding, "Since HMOs make money by cutting costs, and it could cost $40,000 (or more) to provide suicidal patients with proper care so that they don't want assisted suicide, the economic force of gravity is obvious." More often than not, my liberal interlocutor will say, "Gee, I never thought about that before," and agree that the HMO factor is a very serious problem confronting the assisted-suicide movement.

Most people haven't yet made the money connection between assisted suicide and the increasing strains on health-care budgets. That may be because reporters, who are usually eager to expose potential financial conflicts of interest in other public-policy issues, tend to be blind to the economic stakes involved in the assisted-suicide controversy. They prefer to see it as a matter of "choice," or of "compassion," or of modernism versus religion. Yet, the realization that assisted suicide will, in the end, be largely about money, is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Take Oregon, where assisted suicide is legal. While the assisted-suicide law does not compel any doctor or HMO to participate in the self-destruction of patients, only Catholic HMOs have said no. Indeed, Kaiser/Permanente Northwest's doctors are known to have written lethal prescriptions under the Oregon law.

But now, Kaiser isn't merely permitting doctors to assist in patient suicides, it is actively soliciting its doctors to participate in the deadly practice. As revealed by the anti-assisted-suicide medical group Physicians for Compassionate Care, a Kaiser executive recently e-mailed a memo to more than 800 Kaiser doctors soliciting PAS-doctor volunteers.