Idaho Futile Care Bill: Doctors Can Unilaterally Decide to Push People into the Grave
I have looked more closely at the awful Idaho futile care bill, S 1114, which I first addressed earlier today. Here are two more extremely objectionable clauses that show the intent to create a duty to die for the most infirm--and expensive for which to care--among us. From section
394504A (6) of the bill:
If an ethics committee has determined that the requested treatment is medically inappropriate or futile, but the patient is later readmitted to the health care facility within six (6) months following such ethics committee determination, the attending physician may rely on the prior ethics committee determination and withhold or withdraw treatment consistent with the prior ethics committee determination if the attending physician and one (1) physician member of the ethics committee determine that the patient's condition either has not improved or has deteriorated since the prior ethics committee determination and that the prior ethics committee determination still applies to the patient's condition, and they document their conclusion in the medical chart.Thank about that! If a patient survived five or six months post ethics committee meeting declaring futility, doesn't it prove the committee was wrong?
But don't worry: The due-process-of-law-denying ethics committee process itself is a sham: It isn't even mandatory:
(8) The ethics committee review as provided in this section shall be purely voluntary. Nothing in this chapter shall require a health care facility to establish or utilize an ethics committee, nor shall this chapter require a health care provider or surrogate decision maker to submit a matter to the ethics committee before withdrawing or withholding health care to a patient.I guess that means the doctor has the right to just say no based on his or her own biases regarding the "quality" of a patient's life!
Doctors should not have the right to decide whose life is worth living. As German physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland stated back in 1806, which I quoted in Forced Exit:
It is not up to [the doctor] whether...life is happy or unhappy, worthwhile or not, and should he incorporate these perspectives into his trade...the doctor could well become the most dangerous person in the state.That was true then, and it is true now. We give physicians the literal power over life and death at each of our perils.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:14 PM
5 Comments
5 Comments:
WHAT??? IDAHO??? I thought it was right thinkers up there. I guess not. I was WONDERING about Idaho and remember posting the question what is going on there here. I thought maybe the disease that's infected the northwest maybe had skipped over the panhandle. I GUESS NOT. When I researched various states'length-of-time requirements for getting a driver's license not too many years ago, it turned out that in Idaho all one had to bring was a high school yearbook with one's photo and the whole process took an hour. I thought they didn't like to restrict people's lives there. But it's the same as in the other states where one would expect "freedom" and individual sovereignty to be paramount values -- the death culture seems to find open doors here. Backwards from what one would expect.
WHOEVER WROTE THOSE RULES AND MADE THAT POLICY BELONGS IN JAIL! HASN'T THAT OCCURRED TO ANYONE? OR ARE THE COPS ALL WORRIED THAT IF THEY DON'T HAVE "A LIVING WILL" THEY WILL "HAVE TO LIVE ON LIFE SUPPORT" TOO? WHAT HAPPENED TO GUTS AND SANITY?
Overnight ABC news or whatever it is had a story on doctors objecting to patients rating them online and making patients sign forms saying they won't do such things. One said that he respects his patients' privacy and he expects his patients ro respect his! HUH? The newscasters pointed out how little sense he was making. The problem is, people treat doctors as if they are smart. I am here to tell you, having seen how intellectually limited and often just plain wacko they are in real life, that they are NOT. They went into medicine wanting to make money; their parents felt entitled for their kid to be a doctor or a lawyer; the whole problem is, as I've been saying over and over here, nobody wants to work, and has respect for real work any more, and too much emphasis is placed on everybody going to college etc. Then we have illegal immigrants doing the work "nobody wants to do." And at the same time life is being devalued. Doesn't anyone see the connection? In any event, the first thing we have to do is, get rid of all the doctors. I'm serious. They're a freaking disgrace.
I'm going to check out the Conservatives For Patients' Rights web site -- just heard about it on the radio. Sounds interesting.
SHS: Especially great art on the entries today!
This whole Titanic thing is interesting. I've never understood why anyone would want to see a horror movie, a disaster movie, etc., and wouldn't have dreamed of seeing that movie. It's bad enough that bad things happen; who wants to see it? Yet people do; there's something in some humans that would, just as there's something in some humans that has created the culture of death. (A phrase, by the way, I heard on radio and tv several times in the last 24 hours, spoken by different people, and one I'd never heard or seen except on SHS!) That "Titanic" would be the highest-grossing (or whatever they call it, and "gross" certainly applies in this instance) movie of all time at the same time the culture of death has been taking hold is no accident.
Well when we accept their word that someone is "terminal" or has X time to live, that's what we're doing, and what we're allowing a foundation for, and that's part of what's tricky about the whole concept of hospice and the way hospice is ow used as a dumping and killing ground. You can't give these guys an inch of ground; a lot of them are not what they're give credit for. You can't let them have laboratory animals to experiment on, you can't trust human patients to them, you can'rt trust the t be ethical and not to ut their own interests first and to hell with the patient. Society has made too much of them from the time they were children and "going to be doctors" and considered "the brightest." That's just for starters; pull up a chair, I have a multitude of anecdotes, illustrations, and examples for you....They're some crew, I'll tell ya that...
And the reason all this keeps going on is that in medicine and science, "protocols" and "authority" are paramount and take precedence over independent thought and the right to question, and doctor and nurses were raised not to question authority, and that gets replicated in the medical setting. No one in that system is free to think, to question,, to challenge, to rebel. That atmosphere of tyranny and lack of reason and creativity then has the same effect in society. "Oh, the doctor said!" Whether it's a nurse or a patient or a patient's loved one, or a legislator or a judge or a President, everybody believes it because A Doctor or A Scientist said it. They theymselves believe they know what they're doing and what they're talking about and that they are right because they are, after all, Doctors and Scientists. That's why we've got this problem. Questioning things just isnt in the scenario and things keep going on the juggernaut, worse and worse.
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