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Government and Medical Industry Deciding Who Dies in the Event of Pandemic

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 10 May 2008
1 comment

Edito Health Governments Catastrophes USA

The task force members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services. The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals "so that everybody will be thinking in the same way" when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.

Care-rationing rules offered:
Who gets left out if resources are scarce in a flu pandemic? Task force lays out a blueprint

CHICAGO — Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The 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.

The task force members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals "so that everybody will be thinking in the same way" when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.

The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said. Their recommendations appear in a report appearing today in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.

Who’s left out:

 People older than 85.

 Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.

 Severely burned patients older than 60.

 Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

 Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.

"If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing," the report states.

To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the task of deciding who will and who won’t get lifesaving care, the task force wrote.

Dr. Kevin Yeskey, director of the preparedness and emergency operations office at the Department of Health and Human Services, was on the task force. He said the report would be among many the agency reviews as part of preparedness efforts.

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.

If followed to the letter, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing will be necessary in a mass disaster, "there are some real ethical concerns here."

James Bentley, a senior vice president at the American Hospital Association, said the report will give guidance to hospitals in shaping their own preparedness plans even if they don’t follow all the suggestions.

Bentley said it’s not the first time this type of approach has been recommended for a catastrophic pandemic, but that "this is the most detailed one I have seen from a professional group."

While the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could help the public understand that it will be necessary, Bentley said.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
 http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/enter...

Forum posts

  • Isn’t it comforting to know that people like george w. bush and dick cheney won’t have to go without medical treatment or have to pay most of their wages (or any of it for that matter) to receive lifesaving care while the rest of us will just have to hope that we don"t get critically sick or injured because we are relatively low on the prioritized totem pole of patients for medical care?

    The wealthy and powerful already have a decided advantage over the rest of us and this will only exacerbate the inequality further. The bush and cheney families have always been firm believers in the "survival of the fittest" ideology as well as most other wealthy families because in their minds they constitute the "fittest" and the rest of us(being the majority of humanity) constitute the "unfit" and therefore undeserving of living or surviving. In another age it was called "eugenics" or "racial hygiene" or "the master race" but now it is hidden behind a euphemism called "triage" during manufactured pandemics or terror attacks or disasters. These murderous blood suckers could not have hoped for a more convenient and palatable way to disguise their agenda for the eventual elimination of their most dangerous enemies-the american people and others-than to cloak it in a supposedly humanitarian doctrine of the "necessity" to sacrifice the lives of those considered unlikely to survive or to become a drain on resources if they were to continue living.

    All tyrants and tyrannincal regimes have espoused the idea that some will have to be allowed to die or be killed so that others may live in bleak times. They exploit natural or man-made catastrophes or they create them so as to give themselves a reason to invoke an indefensible policy because people who have been subjected to a sudden and frightening situation where life or death hangs in the balance on split second decisions lose their abilities to think rationally and independently for themselves and seek guidance and protection from those who appear to be their saviors. Those saviours are just as faulty and vain as the rest of humanity and therefore no less prone to being seduced by the idea of unlimited power in their hands and abusing it to give themselves a sense of god-like superiority and a heightened capriciousness that is not tempered by mercy or morality.

    Anyone who is deemed "inferior" or "criminal" or simply "different" is classified as a liability to society and is marked for extermination regardless of whether they had any guilt in the emergency situation or not. Only the wealthy and powerful and their minions will be accorded the right to live because in a capitalistic system money and power are the only criterias that matter and concepts such as love, compassion, justice, and morality are expendable. These people created the present dire situations facing us and they are also the ones who formulated the draconian "solutions" being proposed. This cannot be accidental or coincidental considering the rise of "disaster capitalism" in the last few decades which gleefully takes advantage of human death and suffering in order to increase the "bottom line" and values of stocks. Capitalism is not a living and self-aware entity that proceeds according to its own natural imperatives and insulated from human manipulations-that is the lie that we are told by the high priests of the system. It was created by and is being guided by human beings who are only driven by greed and lust for power and do not conceive of limitations to their abilities to acquire more of both. We(being the mass of humanity that is) are all just chess pieces being pushed around on a giant chess board by these ghouls in moves and counter-moves designed to bring them inconceivable wealth and power and it matters not to them how many of us they murder or injure or ruin since by the calculus of capitalism and fascism and eugenics, they are the superior race and we are the untermenschen.

    The american people have fallen for the same machinations of tyrants as have the citizens of past societies not because tyrants have become any brighter and craftier in their methods but because the american people did not bother to study history and its relevance to the present and will suffer the same fates. It was George Orwell who crafted the quote in his story about tyranny called 1984 that went "Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future." We were given the opportunity to see our futures by looking back into the past but most of us chose not to out of an arrogant and unwarranted smugness and belief in our exceptionality and superiority to the rest of humanity which convinced americans that they existed apart from the commonality of humanity and world history. That was our fatal mistake.

    And now the elderly, the infirm, the mentally and physically disabled, the poor, and the non-conformists will have to pay a high price for that mistake indeed.