Death Panels? That’s Nothing!
Those “death panels” that certain crazies decried weren’t that at all, but ways of providing incentives for physicians and patients to give serious thought to end-of-life planning. This trumped-up outrage was enough to kill the provision, though.
Here’s some good reporting in the Times on rationing of care, even at the cost of death to some, during a public health emergency, such as, say…a flu pandemic. I’m not at all sure that the rules spelled out here make the best choices, but make them we must in certain situations. Are you surprised to learn that New York State has a “pandemic ventilator allocation plan”? I was, too, but the Empire State (and neer has a nickname seemed so apt) is not alone in anticipating the need to make decisions no one ever wants to make; the article points out that many states, as well as the Veterans Health Administration, have done the same.
Unlike the excoriated “death panels,” though, these killer plans have largely slipped through tedious bureaucratic procedures, unchallenged. But what do you think would happen if we ever had to start ripping ventilators away from people’s faces in order to save others? Doesn’t this deeply unsettling bioethical problem call for much more sunshine than it’s gotten?
2 Responses to “Death Panels? That’s Nothing!”
October 30th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
See also this very lengthy article on choices made during the very real, not at all hypothetical, Hurricane Katrina related medical disaster in New Orleans. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30doctors.html
October 30th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I did read that article, and thought about the many unspoken (and apparently unspeakable) decisions that get made all the time in end-of-life and other desperate medical situations. We need to grow up and face some facts, I think.
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