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Extensive Safeguards Are Built Into New York’s Law To Protect Vulnerable Adults From Abuses & Overreach By Potential Estate Beneficiaries
New York joins twelve other states in allowing terminally ill adults with less than six months to live the option to legally end their suffering with the assistance of medical professionals.
Working with the Legislature, Governor Kathy Hochul, crafted a bill that included extensive safeguards to ensure that no patient was coerced into choosing medical aid in dying. Safeguards include:
- A mandatory waiting period of 5 days between when a prescription is written and filled.
- An oral request by the patient for medical aid in dying must be recorded by video or audio.
- A mandatory mental health evaluation of the patient seeking medical aid in dying by a psychologist or psychiatrist.
- A prohibition against anyone who may benefit financially from the death of a patient from being eligible to serve as a witness to the oral request or an interpreter for the patient.
- Limiting the availability of medical aid in dying to New York residents.
- Requiring that the initial evaluation of a patient by a physician be in person.
- Allowing religiously-oriented home hospice providers to opt out of offering medical aid in dying.
- Ensuring that a violation of the law is defined as professional misconduct under the Education Law.
The effective date of the bill was also delayed by six months to allow the Department of Health promulgate regulations required to implement the law while also ensuring that health care facilities can properly prepare and train staff for compliance.
The additional guardrails make sure people won’t be taken advantage of, while still ensuring terminally ill New Yorkers have the choice to die comfortably and of their own accord.
Addressing concerns raised by those fearing that vulnerable populations, including those with disabilities or the elderly will be pressured into a decision they would not have made on their own, Governor Hochul wrote in Op-Ed in the Times Union, “Confirmation from a medical doctor that the individual truly had less than six months to live, and from a psychologist or psychiatrist that the patient is capable of making the decision and not under duress, will now be required.”
Medical aid in dying is legally authorized for terminally ill, mentally capable adults with six months or less to live in twelve jurisdictions: California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and the District of Columbia.
Laws from these jurisdictions generally require the patient to be over 18, terminally ill, and capable of making their own healthcare decisions. The process typically involves a patient requesting the medication themselves, both orally and in writing, with confirmation of the prognosis by a second physician.
According to End of Life Choices New York (a non-profit organization that supports efforts to expand choice at the end of life), Medical Aid in Dying is rarely used; only about one in three hundred deaths occur in this manner in states where the practice is legal and about one third of patients who obtain the medications do not take them. However, dying patients are enormously comforted knowing that this option is available. The organization reports that New Yorkers support MAID by about a 2 to 1 margin according recent polls including large majorities of Democrats, Republicans, Conservatives, as well as Catholics, and that physicians in New York support the Medical Aid in Dying Act by about a 3 to 1 margin.
According to the National Institutes Of Health, in 2022, approximately 1,904 people died using authorized medical aid in dying (MAID) across U.S. jurisdictions, representing less than .003% of total deaths that year. While utilization varies by state and year, the practice is generally rare, primarily driven by patients with terminal cancer.
Across all U.S. jurisdictions that authorized it from 1998 through 2020, 5,329 patients died by MAID. In 2023, 884 individuals died through the End of Life Option Act in California, and a 23-year analysis of MAID laws found most users are white (over 95%), well-educated (72%) and have a cancer diagnosis (74%). Approximately one-third of patients who obtain the medication do not ultimately take it.
In Canada, which has a different system, over 15,000 individuals received MAID in 2023, where assisted dying accounts for about 4% of annual deaths.
“Our state will always stand firm in safeguarding New Yorkers’ freedoms and right to bodily autonomy, which includes the right for the terminally ill to peacefully and comfortably end their lives with dignity and compassion,” Hochul said.
“The Medical Aid in Dying Act will afford terminally ill New Yorkers the right to spend their final days not under sterile hospital lights but with sunlight streaming through their bedroom window. The right to spend their final days not hearing the droning hum of hospital machines but instead the laughter of their grandkids echoing in the next room. The right to tell their family they love them and be able to hear those precious words in return.”
