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Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.
Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia…
Public health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University called the report an important initiative but also “a political minefield and a legal minefield.”
The recommendations would probably violate federal laws against age discrimination and disability discrimination, said Gostin, who was not on the task force.
I wonder what the standards will look like when chiseled into bureaucratic stone? After all, FEMA might be in charge.
It’s called triage. Unless you have infinite amounts of both doctors and facilities it is the way to go when there are huge amounts of casualties. Reality bites but, it’s still reality.
#1 well said. In times of emergency, some rights need to be sacrificed, and I’ll be damned if emergency care was delayed or not available because resources were used on a 90 year old with one foot in the grave or some mental retard who couldn’t tie his own shoe lace.
If it’s really a pandemic, there won’t be enough people left to sue anyone.
#1 – Lawyers
#2 – Politicians
#2 I agree, but rights don’t enter into it. It’s about patient survival rates when the ability to provide care is stressed or non-existent.
It happens every time there’s an accident and there are more victims than there are ambulances or other methods to get them to a hospital.
I also think the dilemma is not about “who to let die”, but how I as a medical professional maximize the number of survivors of the ordeal (which it surely will be).
This is all well and good but, if the pandemia spreads very rapidly and has a high mortality rate then who gets saved? Katrina has made it very clear that rapid response isn’t necessarily the case with FEMA, now if Katrina would have happend in NYC … (they sure got that WTC mess cleaned up fast!) It’s all about the money, pure and simple, if you got lots of it, maybe you’ll survive, if not probrably not. It’s the American way, survival of the fittest on an economic scale.
Add home shopping hosts and Ryan Seacrest to the list of unsavable and I will put my seal of approval on it.
Cursor_
#4, Judge Jewdy. I was about to type the same thing except the ordering:
#1 politicians
#2 lawyers
lol. a common sentiment I suppose.
1) Lawyers
2) Lawyers
3) Lawyers
4) Bureaucrats
5) Hardened criminals
(Just to make sure about the lawyers – many politicians are lawyers anyway – the worst ones are bound to be mostly lawyers)
😉
#9 – except we end up with the codified result coming from – politicians.
This is very interesting. The “front lines” scenario of the culmination of a ‘social darwinistic’ mindset that pervades so much and allows the very thing envisioned to be a very possible future scenario. It’s ‘eugenics’ carried out on the front lines as the results of many streams of ‘social darwinism’ happens in dozens of less drastic ways.
We need more than ever to abolish the Federal Reserve and re-fortify our Constitution set up precisely to counter the human tendencies to hoard power (and try to exist at the TOP of the ‘social Darwin’ ladder).
D
How about a pandemic that only targets lawyers? Will someone please design that? Pretty please? If it takes out politicians that will be a bonus.
If they follow those rules, its more then likely that doctors will be shot & killed for refusing treatment on a person’s loved on during these disasters as well. If some doctor told me my wife couldn’t get medical care due to some arbitrary rule during a disaster, I’d probably put a gun to his head and force him.
Remember, this nation has 3 guns for every man, woman, and child.
@Joe
I am glad you have your priorities strait. Maybe I should put my Mossberg in my go pack. It is hard to say no to a pistol grip 12 gauge shotgun.
Aw…come-on people…we live in a capitalistic society with a thin veneer of democracy. I love this country and do not want to live anywhere else! Really!
But this issue has already been decided…those with insurance and are willing to pay get treatment first. Those who have insurance, but won’t pay are second. The rest are a crap-shoot with the medicine left over.
Well I guess we start with refusing treatment to illegal aliens. Then the Jews. Then anybody who is still sick.
This all sounds much better to me than our current method of determining who gets treated. No system will ever provide perfect care to all. In most countries, they talk about things like Quality Adjusted Life Years.
Here, we just talk about who has money.
There has to be a better way for determining who gets the limited resources of health care than who has money. Further, we do not care about the cost-effectiveness of the treatment. We consume 56% of the world’s medication with only 5% of the world’s population.
Yet, even for all of our medication, we have the worst health care of any developed democratic nation.
And, let us all not forget that the top members of the Fed judiciary, legislative and executive branches will have, by law, privilege for survival resources over anybody.
Sounds like the results from your run of the mill socialized health care.
A mob of people brandishing guns and demanding treament – is a pandemic in itself.
I think if we really were in this situation, people who became threatening or hard to deal with would go straight to the bottom of the list.
#9 – Isn’t hardened criminals a little redundant in that list?
BUT, in the USA we all know that the ones who will be left to die first are the poor.
What I don’t understand is why people are treated NOW who have a prognosis of poor quality of life/death within 6 months after spending oodles of money.
We should start letting the old/infirm/defective die now in order to develop the protocols and get everyone used to dying according to gods plan rather than all this expensive/futile intervention.
Then we can start breeding stock with better attributes to begin with.
#2 But what if that 90 year old retard is your father? #20 you would be the first to die.#18 you are correct.
#13 – The problem is, you won’t be the only one with a gun. So you’ll have to shoot it out with everyone else who’s desperate, armed, and wants the doctor for himself. Bring plenty of ammo. And watch your crossfire (you don’t want to kill the doctor).
#24–what about your family members?==You get the triage standards explained to you real slowly so that you can understand what limited resources mean, and then your name gets added to the list for being retarded.
A double win if you will.
it’s called “life-boat ethics”
#27–yes, and it goes on everyday for everything in short supply. Waiting list for all organ transplants occurring right now with lots of money spent trying to develop mechanical and non-human biological replacements.
Flu pandemic is interesting as with unlimited funding, vaccines could be developed as the technology/science is off the shelf and well understood. Our government just hates spending the money when 19 our of 20 years (or whatever) there is no pandemic. We just aren’t smart enough to figure out what genetic change in the stock will be lethal to humans.
Darwin gave us the mechanism, but not the time table.
Speaking of pandemics …
see: European Union proposes feeding animal remains to chickens
#29
Chickens eat animals.