Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others

Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don't have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it's a very difficult conversation. It's emotionally draining.

You have the quality of your work and the integrity with which you do it.

Guilt. It comes naturally to me as a Jew and a Liberal.

By establishing a social policy that keeps physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia illegal but recognizes exceptions, we would adopt the correct moral view: the onus of proving that everything had been tried and that the motivation and rationale were convincing would rest on those who wanted to end a life.

Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.

We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions.