Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, was removed from her ventilator last month because she couldn't pay her medical bills. The hospital gave Ms. Habtegiris' family 10 days' notice, and then, with the bills still unpaid, withdrew her life support on the 11th day. It took Ms. Habtegiris about 15 minutes to die.
In the aforementioned article linked above, writer Steven E. Landsburg criticizes those who have said this is unfair. I won't go into details, just read the article first. Quite frankly, Landsburg comes off as cold and illogical. His main argument is this: if we are to offer "75 dollars," he says, to a poor person - wouldn't they rather have it now than when they are on life support? The answer of course is that this hypothetical makes no sense considering the situation never had to be an either/or like that. And it misses the greater point that no one should die because of lack of money. I don't care how capitalist you are, that can't ever be thought of as right. Certainly the hospital could have provided more than 10 days' notice and worked with the family to come up with a method of payment, in the very least. As far as the details of the case have been made known, we aren't dealing with a Schiavo situation in which (at least some) of the family wanted to remove the machines. And whatever her condition is irrelevant to the point at hand.
Anyway, I was stunned by this article and I hope the rest of you are too.
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
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3 comments:
Uh, yes, he's an idiot. I don't think we need to pick apart his argument because for one he's not defending the hospital's decision and for two he doesn't make sense anyway.
As for the hospital's decision, that's quite unconscionable. How could their administrators choose to do that? Isn't life more important than money?
That is a completely illogical argument. This is one of those instances where someone takes what's a fairly isolated incident, inflates it to a larger problem then it could ever be, and then attacks that straw man. Not only does he fail to demonstrate basic compassion as defined even in his own article, he fails to demonstrate a logical argument. As Nat-Wu says, he's not even talking about what happened here. The law should require hospitals to keep people on ventilators, and if people are too poor to pay for it, then the state should pay for it. The pressure should not be on the poor to come up with the money for medical care. The pressure should on the state to pay for it; only in that way will the state have any incentive to make medical care more affordable and to make health care universally available to all. That is both logical and compassionate in my opinion.
By the way, if you want to tell Baylor of Plano what a bunch of miserable misers they are, you can do so here:
https://www.baylorhealth.com/forms/contactus.aspx
In this case, I'd say no language is too harsh.
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