The Editorial LiveJournalists addressed the Texas Futile Care Law on Saturday.
We have previously discussed the Texas Futile Care Law as applied to several Houston cases. Essentially, the law authorizes hospitals to terminate the care of patients if the hospital determines further care to be medically futile. The decision of the hospital may not be appealed or reviewed by another entity, and the family’s wishes or financial means do not factor into the decision. Once the decision is made, families have ten days to locate another facility for the patient, or the patient’s care is removed. In practice, most facilities are not going to want to take on such patients (if they can even be moved), and so the decision of the hospital is typically final.
Pro-life activists in Texas have recently taken aim at the Texas Futile Care Law, hoping to abolish it or radically reform it. They contend that hospitals should not enjoy the unreviewable power to terminate a life by denying treatment (even for patients that have the financial means to continue treatment). Theirs is principled opposition, regardless of whether or not one agrees with that position.
The response of the Editorial LiveJournalists is to call them names:
Texas’ futile-care law was designed to balance patients’ rights with the ethical and medical judgment of hospitals. To better strike that balance, the law needs to be fine-tuned — not abolished, as some extremists want.
As it stands, hospitals must follow an established protocol before ending life support. Doing so protects the caregivers from lawsuits. If a hospital ethics committee agrees that further care is futile, a dissenting family gets 10 days to find a facility to take their relative instead.
Even smaller medical decisions are hard for relatives to make. Families blindsided by grief, confusion and care-management deserve more than 10 days to process information and locate alternative care. Twenty days or even more would be a humane time period in which to accept a hospital’s decision — or find a way to circumvent it.
The law’s dispute-handling system also needs fixing.
So, those who oppose the Texas Futile Care Law on principled pro-life grounds are extremists, and the Editorial LiveJournalists’ proposal to fix things is to extend the period the hospital must wait to terminate care and to create a new mediation bureaucracy that will “give [families] a disinterested, third-party hearing that might make their findings easier to take.”
The Chronicle is certainly entitled to that view, but it’s a shame that they are so flippant and dismissive of those who think the current law is deeply flawed. That can’t be an insignificant portion of the Chronicle‘s (declining) readership. The Editorial LiveJournalists’ advocacy of a bureaucracy that would dictate end-of-life decisions to patients/families and their doctors is even more curious, since the Editorial LiveJournalists view some end-of-life decisions by patients/families and their doctors as sacrosanct decisions that should be subject to no interference from a third party.
RELATED: How faith saved the atheist: Why did the doctors stop asking me to pull the plug? (Pamela R. Winnick, OpinionJournal).
