Saying No to the Culture of Death

Andrea Clarke is a 54 year old Texas woman who was in St. Lukes Hospital. She had been seriously ill after she had open heart surgery in January. The ethics committee at St. Lukes decided to pull the plug on Andrea, because she was on life support and dialysis. Her family stated clearly that Andrea wanted to live and they had to try and find a hospital that would take and treat Andrea. Fortunately a doctor who believes in the Hippocratic Oath has taken on Andrea's case and she has been transferred to another hospital. Since her transfer, Andrea's condition has been improving.

As information has been hitting the net concerning Andrea's case I have learned that she was a blue baby, that is she was born with a hole in the heart, and that she need heart surgery when she was very young. This condition had left her somewhat weak. She is a widow and she has a 23 year old son. I cannot imagine how this son felt when he was told by the doctors at St. Lukes that they did not want to continue with Andrea's treatment. It must have been devastating to him to hear that his mother was being given a certain death sentence by a group of doctors who did not know how to manage this woman's condition. Fortunately, the family retained Jerry Ward as their lawyer and it was Jerry who sparked a series of legal moves that prevented St. Lukes going ahead with their plan.

St. Luke's hospital has been working under the legislation that was signed by George W. Bush in 1999. Under this legislation, once the ethics committee decides that further treatment for the patient is futile there is a 10 day period in which the family is left to try and find another facility to take the patient and to continue the care. This legislation should have been providing protection for the families where there is no advance directive but what has been happening is that these faceless ethics committees have been making decisions that are heart wrenching for the families concerned. The decisions are in fact quite ruthless because they are giving the patient a certain death sentence.

It is not clear what the motivation might have been in the Clark case, because Andrea is covered by health insurance. That does not exclude the possibility that the HMO was placing pressure on the hospital because of the cost of Andrea's care. On the other hand it could be that the doctors at St. Lukes are incompetent when it comes to looking after a patient like Andrea Clark.

The number of cases that are being classed as futile are on the rise. Maybe, in some cases this is true. However, there is a lot of stinging criticism that the hospitals have been discriminating against the poorer members of society in Texas and that the death sentence is being carried out on poor black folks. If there is any truth to this criticism then more people should be shouting about the injustice of this new system.

Most of the cases that I have heard about have been a mixture of white, Asians and black people. It would seem that the ones who lose their loved ones to an untimely death are those who are poor blacks. This suggests that there is a racist bias in these decisions, and it also suggests that the poor are not being treated equally with those who are better off as far as income is concerned. This is a reason to be very concerned about the way in which doctors have abandoned the Hippocratic Oath. Once the Hippocratic Oath had been abandoned by new doctors, the quality of health care that is being offered to the poor has dissipated to a new low. Instead of taking all steps to bring a person back to health, doctors are indulging in quality of life decisions, which are at best, discriminatory in that they are based upon the beliefs of the person who is making the decision, not upon what the person who is facing certain death might think or believe.

The Texas legislation was meant to protect people who did not want to be put to death by furtive euthanasia methods, but instead of helping this legislation has led to more and more cases of furtive euthanasia because these faceless ethics committees are making choices about the healthcare of a patient, decreeing that further care is futile, when in fact the doctors have not been following the proper life saving protocols.

Yes, it is definitely time that there is a rethink about how healthcare is being provided. It is time that the standard of healthcare for all was raised. There is a lot that needs to be done to improve the standards of healthcare, and that includes pharmacology costs. Some medications are hellishingly expensive and I do believe that the pharmaceutical companies need to be held accountable for those costs. There is a lot of money that goes into research and development, but once these drugs are out of the R & D phase, and they have been approved by the proper authorities, then the company should be bringing down the cost of those drugs to the public. There is no real need to assign R&D to the most common drugs. There is also no need for the prohibitively high cost of drugs that are required for people with Arthritis, especially the new anti-TNF drugs. Once these drugs are being produced in sufficient quantities the price should be dropping. The same goes for equipment that is being used daily in the hospitals, for once the cost of the equipment is depreciated then that cost is no longer applicable to patient care, after all that equipment is a capital cost. This leaves the cost of nursing care, as well as that of the doctors. If the doctors are employed by the hospitals, then they are salaried staff, and their time is spent with multiple patients, again that means that high costs for patient care is not necessary. It would seem that certain costs are being factored into what is being charged for a patient that is unreasonable.

This is very relevant to a case such as that of Andrea Clark. The doctors at St. Lukes were failing in their duty to give her the best of care that would see her recovering from her operation. Instead of doing their best to ensure that she survived and became a viable member of society they were too prepared to hand her a death sentence, proclaiming that further treatment was futile. Since she has been in the hands of this other doctor she has begun to improve and that means that the ethics committee at St. Lukes need to do some serious soul searching about how they are arriving at their decisions to end the lives of patients who are temporarily on life support.