id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
inlawrev-18390	Orentlicher, David	Aging Populations and Physician Aid in Dying: The Evolution of State Government Policy	2015	13	.pdf	application/pdf	6182	365	63	Moreover, the right could be exercised not only by the terminally ill, but also by people who could expect with treatment to live for decades with a high quality of life.11 All medical treatments have side effects as well as benefits, and the law leaves it to the individual to decide whether the benefits are sufficient to outweigh the harms of treatment.12 In other words, quality of life is just as important as length of life, and people should be able to take into account both quality and length of life in making their medical decisions.13 On the other hand, no matter how sick a person became, no matter how terminal their disease, and no matter how great their suffering, there was no right to obtain a prescription for a lethal dose of medication.14 The law once drew a very bright line between treatment withdrawal, which was permitted,15 and suicide assistance, which was prohibited.16 In recent years, this sharp distinction between withdrawal of treatment and assisted suicide has begun to erode. Rather, for the same reasons that the law drew a sharp distinction between treatment withdrawal and suicide assistance, it is now relaxing the distinction.26 In other words, moral views about suicide assistance are not changing, but the law is being changed to better reflect the same moral views.	cache/inlawrev-18390.pdf	txt/inlawrev-18390.txt