MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-07-30 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] No end to the medical ethics problems we now
|
Social justice engineers are now targeting your health care
Betsy McCaughey
4-5 minutes
When lifesaving medicines run low, hospitals have to choose which
patients get a scarce drug. Ethicists historically have recommended
giving the drug to the patient most likely to benefit or using a
lottery.
Not any more. Pennsylvania hospitals are tilting the scale in favor of
patients from disadvantaged areas. If youre middle class, youre toast.
To redress social injustices, Pennsylvania is applying a weighted
lottery statewide, to hike the odds that the scarce drug remdesivir for
COVID-19 will be given to patients from poor neighborhoods.
Remdesivir is a medicine that speeds recovery and increases survival
chances by 62 percent, according to its maker. If you can get it. Your
zip code could literally mean the difference between life and death.
This is all very new, explains Douglas White, an ethicist at the
University of Pittsburgh, who helped devise the weighted lottery. Some
ethicists are urging other states to follow suit. If remdesivir runs
short in South Carolina, the state will apply preference like the one in
Pennsylvania, according to Dee Ford, a professor at the Medical
University of South Carolina.
People need to speak out against this deadly scheme.
In the past, if many patients needed a scarce drug, deciding who got it
involved only their medical conditions and likelihood of recovery. Its a
far cry from favoring patients from low-income areas.
The Greenwall Foundation, a medical-ethics group, advocates mitigating
health disparities by prioritizing who gets remdesivir and future
COVID-19 therapeutics. So do researchers at the University of
California, San Francisco.
Its common sense that when a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, it
should be distributed to disadvantaged neighborhoods first to prevent
the most cases. Residents there are more likely to live in crowded
conditions, be unable to socially distance and work on jobs in mass
transit and grocery stores that expose them.
But caring for hospital patients is a different matter. Equal treatment
is the only morally acceptable rule. Patients need to trust that their
caregivers are doing all they can. Families shouldnt have to wonder if
their zip code had something to do with why Dad died in the ICU.
This isnt just about remdesivir. Hospitals face shortages of lifesaving
drugs often, including the widely used vincristine for childhood
cancers.
Allocating scarce medical resources, including kidneys and livers, based
on economic criteria is an idea gaining steam. The Organ Procurement and
Transplantation Network floated a proposal in January to require
transplant candidates to provide household income on their applications,
as a first step toward increasing the number of transplants offered to
patients with low socioeconomic status. The proposal has provoked
considerable controversy from other transplant advocacy groups.
Academics are using the pandemic as a launching pad to push their
redistributionist agenda. But it isnt what the public wants. A majority
of people say a hospitals goals should be saving the most lives and
treating people equally, a new poll shows.
Most states arent rigging the system. Yet. New York has so few patients
hospitalized with COVID-19 that it recently sent remdesivir to Florida.
Texas is reserving its supply for patients not yet on ventilators.
Minnesota emphatically rejects socioeconomic preferences.
Even so, rationing against the middle class is likely to spread if left
up to university medical ethicists, who are trying to keep it quiet.
The Pennsylvania lotterys designers say they were inspired by a weighted
lottery for oversubscribed charter schools that gave preferences based
on address. But preferential treatment in hospitals, where it can
literally determine who survives, would be even more divisive.
The ICU is no place for social engineering. Its nothing short of
frightening. The public needs to stop it now.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.
--
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that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
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