"Compassionate Conservative"'s life-support law at work
Remember that Texas law, the one that George W. Bush signed into law, that says life-support can be removed from hopelessly ill patients against their wishes if they don't have the funds to pay for it?
It was used a few weeks ago to take a conscious cancer patient off a respirator against her wishes. She just wanted to stay alive long enough to say goodbye to her mother, who had to come from overseas. The hospital disagreed and pulled the plug. It took 15 minutes for the conscious woman to suffocate and die.
Where were all the right-to-life advocates in her case? Oh, wait, the patient was black. Never mind.
The moral of the story: If you don't have health insurance, you're not welcome in the Texas that Bush built. So much for the much-vaunted right-wing "culture of life".
Don't get me wrong - I can understand that it's necessary to ration expensive health care based on medical criteria. I just don't think that a law that only permits witholding care from uninsured patients is the right way to do it. I also think that if Ms. Habtegiris's family had been motivated to go to the press before she died, they could have raised enough charity donations to fulfill her last wish - to die in her mother's arms... but appeals to public sentiment are also not the right way to fund health care, no matter how many cute kids get their organ transplants paid for that way.
Source: http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa051214_lj_african.bb0e76d.html
(via cellio via Daily Kos)
It was used a few weeks ago to take a conscious cancer patient off a respirator against her wishes. She just wanted to stay alive long enough to say goodbye to her mother, who had to come from overseas. The hospital disagreed and pulled the plug. It took 15 minutes for the conscious woman to suffocate and die.
Where were all the right-to-life advocates in her case? Oh, wait, the patient was black. Never mind.
The moral of the story: If you don't have health insurance, you're not welcome in the Texas that Bush built. So much for the much-vaunted right-wing "culture of life".
Don't get me wrong - I can understand that it's necessary to ration expensive health care based on medical criteria. I just don't think that a law that only permits witholding care from uninsured patients is the right way to do it. I also think that if Ms. Habtegiris's family had been motivated to go to the press before she died, they could have raised enough charity donations to fulfill her last wish - to die in her mother's arms... but appeals to public sentiment are also not the right way to fund health care, no matter how many cute kids get their organ transplants paid for that way.
Source: http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa051214_lj_african.bb0e76d.html
(via cellio via Daily Kos)