Kevin Irvine

About the author: Kevin Irvine is a member of Not Dead Yet, a disability-rights action group that works to prevent the legalization of physician-assisted suicide.

The U.S. health care system takes a bottom-line approach to medical care and views disabled and terminally-ill patients as expenses. As a result, if health care providers were given legal authority to carry out physician-assisted suicide, they would do so even against patients' wishes because such an approach would reduce the costs of caring for the seriously ill.

People with AIDS tend to have a skewed view of legalizing physicianassisted suicide. We usually think about it only in terms of our own illness. We remember those who died from painful, debilitating diseases and infections, and this understandably makes some of us want...