Posted on 06/29/2011 4:25:01 PM PDT by wagglebee
Annie Farlow was just short of three months old when she died in an Ontario hospital of what her parents believe might have been a treatable respiratory condition.
Born with the chromosome disorder Trisomy 13, Annie had little chance of surviving to her teens, but her parents, Barbara and Tim Farlow, had taken comfort in the hospital’s assurance that their daughter’s genetic disorder, also known as Patau syndrome, wouldn’t preclude her from receiving the same level of care as any other child suffering from a medical condition.
But months after Annie’s death, the Farlows discovered that physicians at the hospital had not initiated emergency resuscitation measures in their daughter's case with the same alacrity as they would in others. They also found out that a physician had placed a “do not resuscitate” order on Annie’s chart before obtaining their consent, and subsequently their daughter had been administered an undisclosed quantity of narcotics that, in the Farlows' opinion, could have caused her "unexplained, rapid" decline.
The circumstances surrounding Annie’s death have left the Farlows asking age-old questions that plague Canadian patient advocates, health care professionals, ethicists and policy makers in the face of growing health care resource scarcity: When is it appropriate to limit or withdraw potentially beneficial treatment? Who should make those decisions? How should decisions be made?
“I never took the position that my daughter had a right to any and all treatments, but the unilateral decisions we believe the doctors made should have been made transparently. We have a right to know and appeal the limits of the system, and be provided with whatever care is possible within its confines. Not only do I believe my daughter was denied a chance to prolong her life, the secrecy in which decisions seem to have been made also meant she was denied timely palliative care, and she suffered greatly at the end.”
Health expenditures consume more than 50% of revenues in six of Canada’s 10 provinces, not including federal transfers, and are on pace to consume some 75% of revenues in five provinces by the year 2019, according to the Fraser Institute (www.fraserinstitute.org/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=3411).
Canada’s aging population and the ongoing development of expensive therapies for life-threatening illnesses are further escalating pressures on the health care system, particularly intensive care units. Surveys estimate that Ontario, among other provinces, will need 80%–93% more intensive beds over the next 20 years, while about 87% of intensive care physicians indicated they had provided “futile” care at least once in the previous year (http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/abstract/177/10/1201?ijkey=90110ebfb38e9dc79c26cfd0ffc266868702b7d4&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha).
“It’s evidenced in things like the exclusion criteria built into new provincial pandemic planning protocols. In the case of a flu pandemic, for example, having a developmental disability now excludes you from access to a ventilator.”
Such protocols set a precedent for withholding and withdrawing beneficial treatment from vulnerable groups, she argues.
Under Canadian law, doctors do not have to provide treatment that they deem “futile." However, without clear consensus about what constitutes futility, clinicians have no clear standard for weighing medical versus nonmedical criteria in their decision making.
“the use of considerable resources without a reasonable hope that the patient would recover to a state of relative independence or be interactive with their environment.”
“These are really existential questions about judging quality of life. I worry we’ll get to a place where we’re the sum of our illnesses. I know that if there’s one respirator and two people, one who will need it for 12 hours and the other who will need it for the rest of their life, there’s a split second allocation decision that’s going to be made, and likely in the favour of the healthier person.”
Some 80% of resource allocation decisions are currently made by physicians at the bedside, effectively putting physicians in the role of “double agents,”
“There’s a clear ethical rule that a doctor has a primary obligation of personal care for each patient, meaning a doctor cannot put the interests of a group, society or another patient in front of the best interests of the patient he or she is treating.”
“At an institutional level, hospitals and health authorities have an obligation to take into account other people’s requirements, rights and needs, and can put efficiency ahead of any one patient in ways a doctor cannot.”
“No one wants to be seen as the person that started the conversation on who we exclude from universal health care. But we’re already excluding people like my daughter in other subtle ways, so the time to talk is now.”
This is exactly what we can expect under Obamacare.
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America would do better if it recognized that the right to die should be an individual liberty that you are free to choose or not.
The right to life DOES NOT include the "right" to die, in fact it expressly excludes it.
Rationing is a required part of government run health care. But there are two kinds of government health care. That which exists for just the poor and indigent; and that which tries to take over all medical care.
Rationing the health care for the poor and indigent makes sense, because taxpayers are picking up the dime, and while they are usually willing to give the poor *some* degree of care, so they’re not dying in the gutter of hideous diseases, they want strict, rational limits to that care.
This begins with a simple list of all medical procedures, which has just three headings.
First, the name of the procedure. Second, how expensive it is. And third, how well does it work?
Oddly enough, there are many medical procedures and surgeries that do not work at all, or work so poorly that they are not worth it. And some of these are extremely expensive.
So if they don’t work, and are terribly expensive, why are the taxpayers paying for them? This is a real rationing decision.
For example, replacing the heart, lungs, and other internal organs of a very premature infant almost never works. And it can cost millions of dollars.
Were that money *not* to be spent, it could be used to provide prenatal care for hundreds, or even thousands of women. And here’s the zinger: with prenatal care, the number of extremely premature infants that need extensive organ replacement drops almost to zero.
So, by eliminating this procedure altogether, the procedure is no longer needed.
But again, this is taxpayer money, so it should be up to the taxpayers, not the government, to determine how generous they want to be.
Another deathbot, eh?
This article is about the medical community deciding to murder this child.
The *right to die* argument does not apply here. A three month old has no capacity to choose therefore someone *chooses* for her.
The only one who has the right to decide when our time is up is God. Period. End of story. It is not our decision either.
AGREED.
imho,
GOD IS THE ABSOLUTE BOSS IN THAT DEPARTMENT
and does NOT take kindly to HIS role in the matter being usurped
by
anyone.
Thanks for the ping!
Well, that is your opinion, and of course you have a right to it. But, I hold a different opinion and I hope you respct that even if you disagree.....Anybody else?
Nobody can stop anyone from taking or trying to take their OWN life.
The minute that someone else becomes involved in it, it becomes murder.
The whole *right to die* movement is premised on the thought that a person has the right to choose when to die themselves. What’s build on that is that they then have the *right* to have someone *help* or *assist* if you will, them in the process. At that point, it becomes murder with a willing victim.
The government has no business legalizing *assisted suicide* or *right to die* because it is in effect, legalizing certain forms of murder by certain people for certain people (victims). They are preying on those who are vulnerable due to a variety of circumstances, which makes it all the more reprehensible.
*Right to die* WILL become *duty to die*, going from a choice, to an obligation, to a duty. The same slippery slope scenario that happened with abortion and gay rights.
It’s a path we dare not start down on.
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