The NYSBA Health Law Section has made this Act a legislative priority. Now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Section leaders like Robert Swidler and Kathy Burke, the Act is closer to passage than ever before. Please lend your support to this Act by writing to your NYS Assemblyman or Senator and asking for his or her support of this important piece of legislation.
This recent New York Times editorial makes all the right points:
Even by the low standards of New York's procrastinating State Legislature, the 17-year stalemate over a measure to allow family members to make health decisions for incapacitated patients is unacceptable and inhumane.The Family Health Care Decisions Act was first proposed by a blue-ribbon task force in 1992. All of these years later and families in New York still have no legal authority to give consent or object to medical treatment -- or even review medical records -- for incapacitated loved ones unless those patients have signed a health care proxy, a living will or other treatment instructions.
Since only about one-fifth of Americans have signed health care proxies or living wills, this is a big problem.
New York's Legislature has come close to approving a remedy only to get derailed by cultural warfare. Senate Republicans previously balked at allowing same-sex partners to serve as surrogates and insisted on superfluous wording covering a pregnant comatose woman. This problem must be fixed.
The proposed bill would bring New York law into alignment with most of the rest of the states. Family members and others close to the incapacitated patient would be empowered to make decisions. Those decisions would have to reflect, as best as possible, the patients' wishes and values. Where that is unknown, decisions would be made in the patient's best interests.
Family members or other surrogates could decline life-sustaining treatment only if it imposes an "excessive burden" on a terminally ill or permanently unconscious patient, or if the treatment would entail an inhumane amount of pain and suffering.
With the end of the legislative session in sight, the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, and the Senate majority leader, Malcolm Smith, need to arrange a prompt vote and get the bill to the desk of Gov. David Paterson for his signature. Patients and families should not have to wait any longer.