Gov. Kathy Hochul looks at changes to 'aid-in-dying' bill, satisfying neither side in long-running debate

ALBANY — Gov. Kathy Hochul, fast approaching a deadline to sign or veto a bill some call "Medical Aid in Dying," has floated several conditions  before making her decision.

The Democratic governor has suggested tweaking the bill with some amendments as a possible precursor to signing it. These include having a person videotape the request for suicide-assisting drugs, requiring a psychiatric evaluation, adding a seven-day waiting period between requesting and receiving the drugs, and delaying the start date of the statute by a year, according to a source familiar with the discussions. WNYC/Gothamist first reported the amendments.

Those conditions aren’t making advocates happy, nor mollifying opponents who refer to the bill as "physician-assisted suicide."

The Medical Aid in Dying Act would allow a "mentally competent, terminally ill adult," age 18 or older, who has a prognosis of six months or less to live, to request self-administered, life-ending medication from a physician. The measure also would provide certain protections and immunities for the prescribing health care providers, for example, for not resuscitating qualified patients who have self-administered the medication.

Proponents had been pushing for the measure for more than nine years when they finally broke through last spring, securing passage by the State Senate and Assembly.

Hochul has until Dec. 31 to sign or veto all bills approved by the legislature in a calendar year, though there is wiggle room to extend the deadline a bit.

Bill supporters said the conditions would turn the bill into a "hollow victory" for the dying.

They say only the wealthy or well-connected could get psychiatric evaluation in a reasonable amount of time, that a one-year delay will hurt those who are dying painful deaths now and that requiring someone to make a video request is "mind boggling."

"The bill already requires there to be an oral request and two witnesses who have no interest in a person’s estate," Corinne Carey, senior campaign director for Compassion and Choices, said. "To require someone to film themselves — you’d have to not ever seen someone suffer extreme, end-of-life pain. And why would someone want their last record of them in their medical record — which could be subject to hacking" — be such a video recording?

"It’s an issue of dignity," Carey added.

On the other side, no amount of tinkering can improve the bill, opponents said.

"No chapter amendments will make this bill acceptable," Dennis Poust, executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said, referring to the term for agreeing to amendments after a bill is passed by the legislature, which isn’t a wholly uncommon practice in Albany.

"Whatever changes the governor can attempt to do to somehow make it better, it doesn’t change the fundamental reality that the state, for the first time, would be authorizing doctors to kill their patients," Poust said.

Hochul generally doesn’t comment on bills she might sign or veto. The closest she has come to discussing this one came late summer, when the governor said: "There are strong views on both sides of the spectrum. Intense views on this. And I’m conscious of that and it’s going to be a very weighty decision on me between now and the end of the year, something that I take, as I said, enormously seriously and we’ll come to the right decision."

By Yancey Roy

yancey.roy@newsday.com@yanceyroy