The letter asks HHS and CMS to establish reporting requirements so federal regulators can track physician-assisted suicide for signs of discrimination against people with disabilities, the elderly, and other vulnerable patients, and to confirm hospices are complying with federal funding restrictions already on the books. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have now legalized medically assisted death, including California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. The lawmakers noted that the overwhelming majority of patients who die this way are already enrolled in hospice care at the time.
In their letter, the four members warned that physician-assisted suicide "raises significant informed consent issues as well as concerns about disability and age discrimination." They pointed to the Assisted Suicide Funding Restriction Act of 1997, which bars federal dollars from being used to cause or assist a patient's death, and asked Secretary Kennedy to close the gap between that law and what actually happens inside hospice programs that currently answer to no consistent federal reporting standard.
No hospice today is required to disclose how often patients under its care request or receive a lethal prescription, who counsels them beforehand, or whether family members, caregivers, or the patients themselves raised it first. Lankford, Kaine, Murphy, and Correa are simply asking Washington to look.
A Number Worth Counting
A letter to a cabinet secretary will not settle the question Job asked from his ash heap thousands of years ago, but it puts a number on something a comfortable age would rather not count: how a nation treats a body it has quietly decided is a burden. Every one of the patients behind these statistics is old, or sick, or dependent on somebody else's patience — and every one of them was made by the same hand that made the senator writing the letter and the reader holding this page.
My friend, there is a difference between comforting the dying and helping them die, and the modern mind has worked very hard to blur it. Hospice at its best sits with a man in his last weeks, eases his pain, holds his hand, and lets him finish his days surrounded by people who love him. That is mercy. Handing him a prescription because his care has grown expensive, or because nobody visits, or because he has begun to feel like a weight on the family — that is something else wearing mercy's clothes. Scripture never once tells a suffering man that his life has stopped being worth living. It tells him God is still counting his days.
"Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass." (Job 14:5)
Job said that in agony, boils head to foot, having lost his children and his health in a single season, and he still did not conclude that the number belonged to him to cancel early. It belonged to God. That is not a hard word aimed at the dying — it is a tender one. It means a man's worth was never measured by his usefulness, his mobility, or his medical chart. It was fixed the day God knit him together, and no diagnosis can revoke it.
The Psalmist prayed the same confidence into his own fear:
"My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me." (Psalm 31:15)
That is the safeguard no reporting requirement can fully provide — not a form filed with CMS, but a Father who holds the clock. Regulations can catch coercion; they cannot give a dying man hope. Only the gospel does that. Christ did not avoid suffering or death; He walked into both, carried the full weight of them on a cross, and rose to prove death does not get the last word over anyone who belongs to Him. The lawmakers behind this letter are right to ask whether the vulnerable are being protected. The church's task is larger still: to sit with the dying, to tell them plainly that their days are numbered by a God who loves them, and to point every one of them toward the only Physician who has already conquered the grave.