By Edward Zelinsky
The sad story of Casey Kasem’s last illness is now over. Casey Kasem was an American pop culture icon. Among his other roles, Mr. Kasen was the disc jockey host on the legendary radio program, American Top 40. He was also the voice of Shaggy Rogers of Scooby-Doo.
Unfortunately, for many Americans Casey Kasem is now known as the subject of a bitter dispute between his widow Jean and his children from his first marriage. In the face of Mr. Kasem’s debilitating dementia, Mrs. Kasem wanted to continue medical care while his three children from his prior marriage had concluded that care was pointless and should be discontinued. Mr. Kasem’s children prevailed in the California courts based on a document Mr. Kasen had signed in 2007. Life support was accordingly withdrawn and Casey Kasem died shortly thereafter.
At one level, it is surprising is how rarely we hear today of such stories of conflict over end-of-life care. Cases involving Nancy Cruzan, Karen Ann Quinlan, and Terri Schiavo were once prominent in our public discourse.
An unheralded accomplishment of the American political and legal systems is the largely successful privatization of end-of-life health care decisions. Through documents variously denoted as living wills, health care proxies, medical powers of attorney, and health care instructions, an individual while mentally competent can plan for the end of his life. Central to such planning is the designation a medical decisionmaker and the specification of the criteria to be applied by such decisionmaker if an individual becomes incapable of making medical decisions for him- or herself.
Macro of a living will document. © zimmytws via iStockphoto.
These planning procedures, while not panaceas, have largely ensured that end-of-life decisionmaking will be made, not in courtrooms, but where such decisions belong: by the dying individual’s designated loved ones.
Two important lessons emerge from the Kasem family’s unfortunate experience. First, spouses are not automatically medical decisionmakers for each other. Spouses should formally designate each other as medical decisionmakers, if that is what they want.
Unfortunately, debate over same-sex marriage has confused matters, leading many individuals to erroneously believe that, simply by virtue of marriage, spouses are automatically each other’s medical decisionmakers. They are not. For example, Michael Schiavo’s status as husband did not guarantee him the right to make medical decisions for his wife Terri.
It is sensible to require that spouses must formally designate each other as their end-of-life medical decisionmakers. To take the most obvious case, suppose that spouses are estranged and that a healthy spouse will gain financially through an inheritance on the death of a wealthy, ill spouse. We would not want the healthy spouse in this setting to terminate medical care unless the ill spouse had signaled that that was what he wants. Or, to take a more benign situation, spouses may love each other but still think that other persons, e.g., the children from prior marriages, will be better decisionmakers under the stress of an end-of-life situation.
The bottom line is that spouses should execute the formal instrument of their respective state, however that instrument is designated, if they want each other to be health care decisionmakers. Marriage, by itself, is not legally sufficient to make spouses medical decisionmakers for each other.
The second lesson of the Kasem story is that, even if all of the proper documents have been signed, terminating medical treatment at the end of life is a difficult and painful decision. For example, one commonly used formula specifies that medical treatment should be withdrawn when an individual’s condition is “terminal.” Unfortunately, the physicians advising in end-of-life settings do not always agree when a conditional is “terminal.” If consensus exists, it is still painful to withhold medical care even if an ill individual previously authorized such withholding while he was healthy and competent to decide.
Casey Kasem left Americans with wonderful memories. His parting contribution to the American people was to remind us of the need for proper end-of-life planning and to demonstrate that, even with such planning in place, medical decisions at the end-of-life can be painful and difficult.
Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America. His monthly column appears on the OUPblog.
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