If the next medical ethic to go is physician and health care conscience clause, what will be the consequence?
The largest generational cohort in American history, the Baby Boomers, will be the first Americans to be denied available effective life-saving treatments for reasons of cost. The seeds for this mass liquidation have already been planted.
This is not sci-fi. This is in the works now. Imagine…
Imagine that it is 2016, and you are a 65 year old boomer. You have been admitted to your local community hospital with malaise, fatigue, vomiting and cloudy mental status. You have had blood pressure problems and diabetes for a few years, and have just been diagnosed with renal failure. As you drift in and out of consciousness, you are vaguely aware your old family practice physician, who had taken care of you for 20 years, is not around. A religious man, he quietly retired from medical practice in 2014, after the full force of the Obama administration‘s removal of conscience protection for physicians in February, 2009, came into effect.
You feel vaguely uncomfortable as you are placed in a darkened room in the Comfort Care wing of the hospital. In moments of lucidity, you wonder if you shouldn’t have some oxygen, an IV or SOMETHING! But the appropriate therapy, kidney dialysis, is not on the approved list of treatments for patients over 65, having been deemed too expensive. The new regulations from the Department of Health and Human Services were presented just last month to your hospital’s Futile Care Committee. It was decided at the highest levels that for those over 65 years of age, renal dialysis would not be a beneficial treatment, that the alternatives of a kidney transplant were too expensive, and that your quality of life on chronic dialysis would be too diminished.
Oh, but there’s more…
Your children wonder why you are not in an ICU. They are told that you will be placed on a morphine drip to make you more comfortable as you pass away, and that this is the highest standard of care for your diagnosis and age. It is called terminal sedation. You signed an advanced directive indicating that you did not want extraordinary care for a terminal condition, and under the new protocols renal failure, although treatable, qualifies as a terminal condition.
Your children frantically try to find their old family doctor. But your health plan replaced him with a large group of younger physicians, the hospital’s Consortium for Health, a private-public foundation that was created to promote efficiency and reduce wasteful spending in medical care. By 2014 when he left, your family doctor was a dinosaur, having been trained in an earlier era. His medical school was one of the last to retain the original Hippocratic Oath. It affirmed the covenantal relationship between the physician and patient, overseen by God, and that whatever the physician did would be for the patient’s benefit. You had felt safe entrusting your health to Dr. O’Brien’s professional judgment.
You can’t afford that sense of complacency anymore.
Your doctor (and many other Americans) believed that failure to protect physician conscience will destroy the trust and accountability that is essential to the physician patient relationship. If the physician and patient cannot freely collaborate, ultimately another agenda — that of the health plan or state — will replace it, to everyone’s detriment.
We directly confront these issues on ‘America’s Lifeline’ each week. Tune in, be informed and be prepared.
