PLEASE SEE: Secondhand Smoke for today's update and planned legal action…

Wow. It looks as if St. Luke's is hell-bent on facilitating the Constitutional challenge this law merits. Glad to see that attorney Ward is prepared to launch requisite legal actions, and I hope concerned parties on both 'sides' of the broad support coalition will help to finance the challenge. Perhaps they can get emergency consideration to the Texas Supreme Court quickly, because I expect the hospital will appeal any injunctions the family is able to obtain.

And for poor Andrea Clark (for whom many prayers have been said), let's hope she isn't callously murdered just for spite in the meantime. If the care is truly futile, then let it be futile in God's own time. The challenge will go forward regardless, with hope of preventing this travesty in the future. As Smith so eloquently pointed out, what good are advance directives and medical powers of attorney if the only decision medical providers will honor are the ones that direct death?

"More of the 'New Eugenics' in Action" April 28, 2006

Read this important post"More of the "New Eugenics" in Action", @ Telic Thoughts. Terri S [...]

This just gets worse and worse! I don't often agree with the right wing on a lot of their signature issues, but here I'll take whatever they've got to offer. Because the participants in this action cover the spectrum, and I believe that's a great strength of unity we can put to good use.

Seems phone calls and emails to St. Luke's in Houston (the hospital at financial issue in this financially-motivated premeditated murder) have done it again. Andrea Clark's family found a hospital in Illinois willing to accept her in transfer, to see what they can do or at least let her die with some dignity. So the current hospital told the family they'd pay the full cost of transfer [~$17,000] if they do it today. If they wait until tomorrow, they'll only pay half, and after that they're on their own.

This, pure and simple, is Patient Dumping. A violation of federal law, by the way, and one among several state and federal laws I used to fight the battle mentioned in my last post.

Yo, Carbon! I don't pity them one bit. I know, that speaks of my lack of human compassion for the malignantly narcissistic, but there you have it. If there's evil - and I certainly believe there is - this is one of its most glaring manifestations. BUT… because I also know that evil is an entirely human invention (and therefore ultimately stupid), I also see that it's asserted itself prematurely on this issue. That means there really may be TIME (fair warning) for us humans to nip this manifestation in the bud. Before too many are killed, and I view killing as primarily a theft of TIME.

I mean, if we're talking mere weeks in any case, what's the hurry? If it's not advisable to transfer her to ICU for dialysis that won't do any good, then she'll die where she is just that much faster. Why suffocate her? It honestly makes zero sense to me medically, morally or ethically.

That said, the trick evil will use to keep on asserting itself (and killing people) as this pogrom moves forward is our current strange reluctance to provide for our citizens that which all other arguably democratic/republic forms of government on the planet provide for their citizens - health care. When you're rationing health care on the sole basis of class/income in favor of corporate greed, human life is of course devalued. They're in it because there's money to be made from closed-market trade in human suffering. If that's not evil then there's no such thing. That's not a religious statement, it's plain old right and wrong.

Guess you can tell this subject is a sore point for me. My son was killed by doctors and insurers and he was an intelligent, 21-year old, fully functional 6'3 blonde with blue eyes, a well-paid celebrity with an unbounded future of possibilities. The pencil-pushers don't read medical records when they trade their stock, so the doctors refused to accept him when he got in trouble after they'd released him without treating injuries they diagnosed - "he'll be fine," they told us. When he did hemorrhage, the helicopter ambulance was left hovering for an hour and a half after a 9-minute transfer refused permission to land after it was pre-approved. Which then required emergency state interference because the helicopter was running out of gas - too late… he'd already bled to death.

I was tremendously tempted more than once in the course of the resulting 7-year legal struggle to just shoot 'em, but in the end those doctors are no longer practicing medicine thanks to me staying the course to hit 'em right where their deadly decision originated: their pocketbooks. They won't be doing that to anyone else's son, but a dozen just like them no doubt took their place.

I see no appreciable difference between an insurer who decides you're not a good money-making risk, a hospital deciding you're in the way, and you being the "wrong color" or the "wrong shape" or whatever other value judgments will be made in this ugly "New Eugenics." So yeah, I think attention and action are necessary. Now, not sometime in the future.

[/rant]

That's a pencil-pusher decision, not a medical ethics decision. As the "New Eugenics" goes forward in the brave new realm of genetic testing [abortion of 'unworthy' fetuses], genetic manipulation [designer babies] and genetic screening [prevention of some people having children at all], there is of course going to be the issue of how society will then treat already-born people whose various disabilities or features have been deemed worthy of artificially selecting out of the gene pool. The deaf, the blind, the small, the large… whatever. It can't be good, and there's reason for concern.

Devaluation of life - over the often strenuous objections of those who would rather be deaf than dead [for instance] - is then bound to trickle down to negative valuations about who deserves to be treated medically too. Bringing us to this current impasse, where the wishes of the patient can be entirely ignored in favor of economic considerations for her insurance company or the hospital bed she has spent the past few months living in.

When blue eyes and blonde hair are the new designer goodies (that would be the "Valley Girl Model), people born naturally and without the elitist-required pre-birth genetic screening who have brown eyes and black hair may find themselves "mercifully" dead at the first opportunity of elitists/medical people to make such decisions. Makes me sick. (Oops! Did I just put myself on their kill list?…)