Posted on 03/19/2019 3:44:04 PM PDT by markomalley
A contentious battle is taking place at this courthouse in downtown Houston, Texas over a law that gives hospitals virtually unlimited power to decide the fate of patients.
Oral arguments took place centering on the question whether the law, called the Texas Advance Directives Act — or TADA for short — violates patients' constitutional rights by depriving them of due process.
Texas Right to Life has led the vanguard in opposing this law.
Incredibly enough, their main opposition is none other than the Texas Catholic bishops, who argue the law comports with Catholic teaching. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed last year, the bishops stated, "Human intervention that would deliberately cause, hasten, or unnecessarily prolong the patient's death violates the dignity of the human person" (emphasis added by bishops).
But critics say the law isn't about needlessly prolonging death; rather, it's about depriving a patient of life and hastening his death.
The Texas Advanced Directives Act came to national prominence in 2015 in the case of Chris Dunn, a former EMT and Homeland Security employee who checked in to Houston's Methodist Hospital in October 2015 suffering from a mass on his pancreas and renal failure.
His doctor determined his "quality of life" warranted no further medical care, and the hospital's ethics panel agreed — against the wishes of Dunn himself, who was conscious, alert, responsive and made clear he wanted to live. A 2015 video shows Dunn practically begging to be kept alive.
Dunn's mother, Evelyn Kelly, fought the hospital, and with the help of attorneys secured by Texas Right to Life, got an injunction against the order, allowing her son to live another month. He passed away peacefully and from natural causes two days before Christmas.
His mother sued the hospital arguing that the Texas Advanced Directives Act is unconstitutional.
The law gives hospital ethics panels enormous power with practically no oversight. Whatever decisions the panel makes with regard to a patient, that decision is final. There is no appeal, no review by any court.
Plus, there's a loophole. You don't have to be terminally ill for a hospital to decide you should no longer live.
And the reasoning behind their decisions remains vague and unclear. A doctor makes the determination that the patient's so-called quality of life does not meet the threshold for continued care, but "quality of life" is subjective, it's amorphous and it differs from doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital
Another concern: The hospital is supposed to decide what's in the best interest of the patient, but too often these panels are made up of hospital staff, giving rise to a conflict of interest. Hospitals know it costs them many thousands of dollars a day to keep uninsured patients alive.
Performing a cost-benefit analysis, from a purely financial standpoint, it's always more beneficial to a hospital to hasten the death of uninsured patients rather than shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep them alive.
Critics rightly fear these ethics panels aren't truly interested in the patients' best interests but care more about the bottom line.
Texas Right to Life has led the vanguard in fighting this law, helping more than 400 families find legal recourse or alternate hospitals willing to take sick patients.
But most troubling is the fact that Texas Right to Life — a very large, very Catholic group — has not received the support of the Texas bishops. In fact, last year, the Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops conducted an unprecedented attack against the pro-life group, one of their criticisms being that it opposes the Texas Advanced Directives Act.
Currently, no other state in the country has a law that gives such wide-ranging power to hospitals to determine the fate of patients, and critics say what's happening here is no more than creeping involuntary euthanasia. Texas Right to Life is vowing to continue the fight to protect the dignity and value of human life with or without the help of the bishops.
Reporting from Houston, this is Christine Niles for Church Militant.
You can transfer out of the facility if you want...see page 26:
https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/HS/pdf/HS.166.pdf
“Been my experience..that we keep them alive as long as possible. $$$$”
Exactly so. They keep them alive as long as their insurance or their bank account allows.
However, rather than doing the honest thing and say you don’t have the money to pay for this, therefore we’re not providing the service, this law applies ethics framework to state that the person’s life is not worth saving rather than simply being honest.
In my opinion, that is not the real scandal. The real scandal is that invariably these ethics boards will only make the determination after the patient, his family, and his insurance have been completely bled dry.
The physician practices medicine under Texas law, not the hospital or committees.
TADA lays out the process which allows the patient’s doctor to practice medicine according to his/her best medical judgement, a combination of education and experience. Otherwise, the doctor would have to indefinitely and repeatedly act against his will and conscience.
When the patient’s attending doctor in the hospital determines that a treatment demanded by the patient or his legal surrogate (in most cases, it’s a family member as also laid out in the Act) is not appropriate, the doc can’t just stop or abandon the patient.
Under the TADA, the doc notifies the patient or surrogate of his decision. If they disagree, the doc must involve the hospital ethics or medical committee.
The committee then notifies the patient/surrogate that there will be a meeting to decide whether the doctor’s decision is medically appropriate. If the committee doesn’t believe the doctor is correct, he should order the treatment. If the committee agrees that the treatment isn’t medically appropriate, the patient/surrogate is informed that the treatment will be stopped in 10 days *and* the hospital must help look for another doctor - and facility - who will agree to accept the patient.
We’ve been trying to amend the law for over 10 years, to increase the time before the committee meeting and before the treatment in dispute is stopped. We had agreed to a total of 30 days back when Patrick was a Senator and Dewhurst was still Lieutenant Governor and Perry was Governor - I think back in 2005. We keep getting blocked by the opposition, and a bunch of lawyers.
The opposition to TADA wants every single one of these disputes to go to court, where lawyers will make their arguments- sometimes with doctors as expert witnesses - and a judge would end up making the medical decisions, possibly forcing the doctor to act against his conscience.
The case in court was much more complicated than presented. The patient had metastatic pancreatic cancer that had damaged his liver so much that he stopped making clotting proteins and nearly bled to death on the day of admission, when he was transferred from another hospital. He had liver and kidney failure, he was jaundiced because the poisons from liver failure were building up in his blood and he was on a ventilator.
He was sedated in order to help him tolerate the breathing tube, was clearly no longer competent to make decisions and hadn’t named a surrogate. His (divorced) parents disagreed about keeping him on life support.
His father believed his wouldn’t want to continue on the ICU treatment and pointed out that he had refused treatment until he passed out.
His mother wanted extraordinary treatment that the doctors believed was causing him pain and suffering. She is suing the hospital although they never stopped the absolutely excellent treatment that kept him alive much longer than anyone could have expected.
No one refused to allow him to be moved to another hospital. Instead, every doctor that was contacted agreed with the attending doctor at Methodist.
Do a search on his name and read the media reports for a better understanding. I can’t follow this thread closely because I’m travelling.
Beverly B Nuckols,MD aka “hocndoc”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.