Paul Malley, President of the national non-profit organization Aging with Dignity, said the nation's 24 million veterans deserve better than the Department of Veterans Affairs current advance care planning tool, "Your Life, Your Choices."
"'Your Life, Your Choices' encourages our nation's service men and women to look at illness and disability as things that render life not worth living," Malley said. "This fuels suspicion and uneasiness about advance directives, and rightly so."
Malley echoed the concerns of Aging with Dignity founder Jim Towey whose guest commentary published in the August 19th Wall Street Journal takes the VA to task for trying to "push poll" vets into choosing to forego treatment that could benefit them. "Your Life, Your Choices" lists several scenarios such as living in a nursing home, being in a wheelchair, or being unable to "shake the blues" and then asks users to determine whether that would make their life "not worth living." Overt appeals to one's sense of guilt over "being a burden" are numerous in "Your Life, Your Choices" and are contrary to a society that values people as a gift and not a burden.
In December 2007, Malley was named as one of a panel of 18 invited by the VA to review "Your Life, Your Choices." He had earlier expressed his concerns about the biased nature of the document and its listing of the Hemlock Society (now called "Compassion and Choices") as a resource. All versions of "Your Life, Your Choices" were removed from circulation, but now it is back in official use. "Steering people in any direction does a disservice both to our nation's veterans and their families and to the larger cause of good advance care planning," Malley said.