Committee is First in the House to Hear, Vote on Bill

The House Health & Human Services Committee voted 9-4 Tuesday to advance legislation (SB24-068) to make access to the Colorado End-of-Life Options Act more equitable for all terminally ill Coloradans. The committee was the first in the House to vote on the bill.

Legislators heard testimony from advocates, clinical experts, and loved ones of terminally ill patients who witnessed the roadblocks that the current, stringent requirements inadvertently created for qualifying patients attempting to access medical aid in dying.

Ashley D. Fry, a board-certified acute care nurse practitioner in Colorado Springs, representing both the Colorado Nurses Association and national non-profit organization Compassion & Choices, expressed the importance of advanced practice registered nurses to patients in rural and frontier communities in the state.

“For my patients who live in rural communities, they often share that their primary care provider is a nurse practitioner. Nurse practitioners have independent practice authority in Colorado, and we oversee the care for our own patients, but currently we cannot participate in this process,” Fry testified.

After a rigorous discussion between committee members, bill sponsor Rep. Kyle Brown, and testifiers, Rep. Eliza Hamrick tearfully thanked the individuals who shared stories of their loved ones who chose the option of medical aid in dying (including Centennial resident Jacob Shannon and Boulder resident Devin Hibbard) and affirmed her supportive vote.

The proposed legislation would not change the core eligibility requirements of the current law: a patient must be a mentally capable, terminally ill adult with six months or less to live for the option to obtain a prescription for aid-in-dying medication they may decide to self-ingest to peacefully end unbearable suffering.

The bill would make access to the option of medical aid in dying more equitable by reducing the minimum 15-day mandatory waiting period between the first and second oral requests to seven days, allowing prescribing providers to waive the minimum 7-day waiting period if the patient is unlikely to survive it but meets all other eligibility requirements, and allowing qualified advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs) with prescriptive authority to act as the attending and consulting providers.

Nine other states and Washington, D.C. allow the option of medical aid in dying, and similar access improvements have been made to the laws in other states, including California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington.

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