Doctor-Assisted Suicide and the Hospitals Bottom Line :: Euthanasia Physician Assisted Suicide

Euthanasia and the Hospitals Bottom Line An important doer in debates over health care and treatment strategies is the issue of cost. It is tremendously pricy to provide the state-of-the-art care that the modern hospital offers. Concerns intimately where the m stary will come from to care for elderly citizens appear to be making the case for mercy killing even more compelling. beneath financial pressure, hospitals are exercising their right to deny such expensive healthcare to the aged or seriously ill. We reserve the right to renounce service Most people have seen these signs at restaurants and retail shops. yet now, metaphorically, some hospitals are hanging such notices over their entryways by promulgating empty care protocols that grant doctors the right to say no to valued life-extending medical examination treatment to patients whose lives they consider lacking in sufficient quality to dislodge the cost of care. Unnoticed by the mainstream press, a disturbing s tudy create in the Fall 2000 issue of the Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care morals reveals how far the futile-care movement, in reality the opening salvo in a planned campaign among medical elites to impose health-care rationing upon us, has already advanced. The authors reviewed futility policies soon in effect in 26 California hospitals. Of these, only one policy provided that doctors should act to support the patients life when life-extending care is wanted. All still two of the hospital policies defined circumstances in which treatments should be considered optional even if requested by the patient or patient representative. In other words, 24 of the 26 hospitals permit doctors to unilaterally deny wanted life-supporting care. How is such medical abandonment justified? Advocates of futile-care theory cleverly campaign the focus away from the physiological effect provided to the patient and toward whether the patient has the potential difference for appreciating the ben efit of the treatment. Thus, the Cambridge Quarterly reports that 12 of the 26 hospitals surveyed prohibit treating people diagnosed with immutable unconsciousness (other than comfort care) based on these patients supposed inability to jockey they are being treated. Never mind that several medical studies manifest that this condition is often wrongly diagnosed (40 percent misdiagnosis according to one British report). And never mind that such patients sometimes awaken unexpectedly, as modern headlines attest. What is most disturbing is that these policies, if enforced, would prevent profoundly brain-damaged and dementia patients from receiving tube-supplied food and urine because such care is considered medical treatment.