Extreme language for drastic measures
The term “death panels” is fairly over the top. So is the reality of futility care practices sort of de facto form such squads.
In Texas, a legislative provision that many thought was an innocuous proposal to help people has been twisted to snatch end-of-life decisions out of the hands of families.
It’s the one Sarah Palin has referred to, riling up heated debates:
The provision to which Mrs. Palin refers, Section 1233 of America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, would allow Medicare to pay doctors to counsel or steer end-of-life decisions for a patient every five years or more often “if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual” or an admission to a nursing home or long-term care facility. Both the White House and some members of Congress dispute Mrs. Palin’s contention about how this language would play out, but based on what has happened in Texas, Americans should heed her warning.
The next line is key:
One of the drawbacks of trying to overhaul an industry as large and sweeping as health care on the short schedule demanded by the president is that there is not time to study how the legislation would work in the context of existing state law.
Take Texas for example…
The Texas Advance Directives Act of 1999 became law with support from a broad ideological spectrum, but one of its unintended consequences has been astounding. When a patient or family wants health care to continue but the attending physician does not, the Texas law allows a hospital committee to have the final say under the amorphous concept of “medical futility.”
Texas law only requires the hospital to provide the patient and family with 48 hours’ notice before a hospital “ethics” committee meets and makes a decision on terminating life support. There are few due-process safeguards in the law to protect patients during this committee proceeding.
Once the hospital ethics committee decides that further care is medically futile, the family is given just 10 days to find a facility that will accept the patient, or the hospital and doctors can end curative care with impunity. Virginia law is similar but gives the family 14 days.
These are clear and definitive examples of what lies ahead if significant changes aren’t made to the health care proposals in Congress.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, is rightly concerned that the end-of-life provisions in the proposed federal law could be “misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly.” Federal lawmakers interested in protecting individual and patient rights need to study carefully the end-of-life provisions with the understanding that the law will be implemented in health care settings governed under 50 different sets of state law…
If the Texas Advance Directives Act has shown us anything, it is that governments should leave end-of-life decisions to patients and their families.
