Monday, October 26, 2009

Death panels, killing granny, killing babies

See! See! All of Fox Nation was absolutely right that health care reform is about killing people to save a buck:

These are “exclusion criteria,” which bar certain categories of patients from standard hospital treatments in a severe health disaster, and “minimum qualifications for survival,” which limit the resources used for each patient. Once that limit is reached, patients who are not improving would be removed from essential treatment in favor of those with better chances. [--Sheri Fink]
Oh, you mean this has been going on for years?!
In recent years, officials in a host of states and localities, as well as the federal Veterans Health Administration, have been quietly addressing one of medicine’s most troubling questions: Who should get a chance to survive when the number of severely ill people far exceeds the resources needed to treat them all?
Why wasn't I told?!

Of course, triage has been visibly obvious to anyone who ever thought about crisis response. It was in the 9/11 stories, for example, sadly because triage units had so few merely wounded to treat. But Fox Nation can't remember anything that gets in the way of their inchoate outrage.

Whom do you save when you can't save everyone in the middle of an acute crisis? Fox Nation is afraid we can't tell the difference between the health care problem and the acute crisis of a raging pandemic, that we might start disconnecting ventilators (from voters!) to save money, rather than to save a person more likely to survive because of treatment.

My diagnosis: delusional paranoia.

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