there is deep concern about trends at the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC). The Center was founded in 1999 at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City by Drs. Christine Cassel and Diane Meier. It is recognized as the nation’s premier training center for development of palliative care programs in US hospitals. As a result of CAPC’s program, the number of hospital-based palliative care programs has nearly doubled — increasing from 668 in 2000, to 1,240 in 2005. Through CAPC’s Leadership Centers across the United States, over 3,100 health care professionals have been taught CAPC’s methods and ethics.
What few have discussed is the fact that the founders of CAPC have a long history as proponents of physician-assisted suicide.
Cut to the funding:
A few short years after Meier-Cassel-Quill penned their guidelines for assisted suicide, Meier was encouraged by Robert Butler, MD — founder of gerontology at Mount Sinai, and friend of George Soros — to apply for funding from Soros's newly formed Project on Death in America (PDIA). Meier won the funding, along with colleagues Sean Morrison and Jane Morris, and with Society for the Right to Die board member Judith Ahronheim (now at St. Vincent's hospital in New York). In 1995, with help from Soros and the United Hospital Fund, Meier and colleagues launched the Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
The Project on Death has folded, but its work has been rolled into the Soros Foundation's Open Society Initiative, under the friendlier-sounding International Palliative Care Initiative. So eager is he to underwrite the termination of life unworthy of living, one begins to wonder which side of the Holocaust Soros is a survivor of.
