Update [2005-12-15 11:13:32 by Steven D]: Note: Original text edited to make it clear — if it wasn’t before — that I don’t think everyone living in Texas is a monster who celebrates Christmas by cutting off life support for fully conscious patients.
Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus. At the Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas apparently, they celebrate his birth by taking fully conscious people off life support (link courtesy this diary by YucatanMan at Daily Kos). And why do they do that? Because, just like Ebeneezer Scrooge, they like to save money:
The family said doctors told them they would have to remove her from life support in 10 days.
It would be nice if this got picked up by all those conservative “news” programs like the O’Reilly Factor, and all the conservative blogs that trumpeted the Schiavo case as an injustice. It would be nice.
But I’m not expecting it.
When the family disagreed, the hospital’s Clinical Ethics Committee met and decided to take Habtegiris off the ventilator.
The hospital declined an on-camera interview, but in a statement said they “contacted 12 facilities including hospitals, long term acute care facilities and nursing homes, all of whom declined to accept the patient.”
Salvi believes this would not have happened if his sister had health insurance.
“If you don’t have money in this country, you’re nothing. You’re not a human being.”
And what did this woman who died 15 long agonizing minutes after being removed from her ventilator want for Christmas? Only to die in her Mother’s arms. Except her mother was in Africa, and no one at the hospital was willing to wait to pull the plug until arrangements could be made to bring her to Dallas. From YucatanMan’s searing diary (quoting a story that is behind a subscription wall at this Dallas News Station:
“They handed me this letter on December 1st. and they said, we’re going to give you 10 days so on the 11th day, we’re going to pull it out,” said her brother Daniel Salvi.
Salvi was stunned to get this hand-delivered notice invoking a complicated and rarely used Texas law where a doctor is “not obligated to continue” medical treatment ….
…Tirhas still responded and was conscious. She was waiting one person.
“She wanted to get her mom over here or to get to her mom so she could die in her mom’s arms,” says her cousin Meri Tesfay.
Ten days was not enough time, they say, to get a mother from Africa to America.
The family and hospital desperately tried to get Tirhas moved to a nursing home but they say no one would take her.
“A fund issue is what I understand. Because she is not insured and that was the major reason the way I understood it,” Salvi said.
A statement from Baylor Plano disputes that and says the hospital did its best to comply with the family’s wishes in every way.
Still, on the 11th day, Tirhas Habtegiris was taken off the respirator and died.
Why couldn’t they wait? Because God and Texas waits for no black woman. Well, God maybe, but not Texas.
And why should they since Texas passed a law while President Bush was governor that lets hospitals off the hook for any criminal or civil liability for pulling the plug:
The law that Bush signed as governor sets conditions for how a patient’s relatives or other surrogates may make end-of-life decisions, and it spells out procedures for cases where the surrogates and medical providers disagree on whether to continue or to suspend life-sustaining care. . .
. . .[T]he Texas law lays out procedures for physicians to follow when they think a patient’s condition is hopeless, even if family members disagree. Doctors can make a case to their hospital’s ethics committee. If the ethics committee agrees, life support can be removed.
But first, dissenting families are given 10 days to find another facility willing to care for the patient.
“That was a law that President Bush did not just allow to become law without his signature. He came back from a campaign trip to sign it,” Wasserman Schultz said.
It would be nice if all the right wing cable “news” shows like the O’Reilly Factor, or the conservative blogs that trumpeted the injustice being done to poor brain dead Terri Sciavo, would take note of this story. It would be nice.
But I’m not holding my breath. There are Satanists infesting Madison, Wisconsin, after all.
