Your recent editorial depicting Dr. Kevorkian as a bandit in medical attire crosses the thin line of semantics. You equate his work with homicide and murder. Murder is killing with premeditated malice.
He has shown no malice; he simply wants to relieve intense and incurable suffering.Perhaps your editor needs experience in these matters. If he were supporting a dear, suffering soul he would get the same feeling that General Custer had at the Battle of the Bighorn - the arrows pierce you from every angle.
The frontal attack is led by the hospitals. They charge you at least $1,000 a day, of which $300 goes to pay the bills of deadbeats who won't pay - if you can imagine that gross unfairness! The rest homes shoot from the side and raise their rates annually several times the rate of inflation. Then the physicians attack. Most are noble but practice assisted-suicide anyway when they pull the plug on a terminal patient and let him or her die. Their rates continue to climb. The pharmacies gain as well.
There you stand, like Custer, and have no defense. "Most of us will spend 85 percent of our life's savings on health care during the last six months of our lives," claimed one expert. However, your editor has a point: If Dr. Kevorkian did not give adequate consideration, he could become a cruel killer.
That is a big maybe because he has not shown such a tendency. His attorney accompanies him on each case. The courts have examined his procedures carefully and have found no wrongdoing.
Why not stay calm and not be so anxious to put a good man down? He is simply trying to relieve suffering, not only for the patient but for all us "General Custers," too.
Paul Lewis Harmon
Salt Lake City