Dr. Stella Fitzgibbons is a Houston based doctor. When she isn’t seeing patients she spends her time selling her services as an “expert witness” in court cases or occasionally, like today, writing an editorial for the press.
Dr. Stella Fitzgibbons calls for rationing of medical care.
Today she wrote a piece in the LA Times effectively calling for “death panels.” Dr. Fitzgibbons doesn’t call them by their politically charged name, but in reality there is no difference. Dr. Fitzgibbons writes:
There is enormous pressure on healthcare providers to continue practicing the most expensive medicine in the world. To resist that pressure, we need some help from policymakers.
Consider the case of a man I’ll call Mr. A. At the age of 80, he is admitted to intensive care after a huge stroke. He also has pneumonia and kidney failure. He is too sick to tell us his views on aggressive care at the end of life, but his family is happy to fill the void. They insist we use every tool at our disposal to prolong his life, despite brain scans making it clear that he will never again be able to walk, talk or feed himself. The total bill for the last month of life? Many tens of thousands of dollars.
Conservatives have long held that the true aim of ObamaCare is rationing and government based decision making in health care. After calling for the plug to be pulled on Grandpa at the bequest of a doctor and/or government guidelines, Dr. Fitzgibbons talks about Mrs. B an ulcer patient:
And that’s not all. Once patients like Mrs. B are diagnosed, they often insist on being prescribed the ulcer medicine they saw last week on a TV ad, which is likely to be a new (and expensive) medication rather than one of the reliable drugs that are older and cheaper.
Both of these patients are composites of people we see at the hospital every day, and they demonstrate why it will be so hard to rein in healthcare spending. Americans have spent the last several decades hearing that all you have to do is be a little assertive to get top-of-the-line treatment. They have had prescription coverage through their health insurance for so long that they have trouble understanding why I won’t prescribe a convenient Z-Pack of antibiotics (at a cost of $60 or so) instead of amoxicillin, which they have to remember to take three times a day (at a cost of about $4). Websites and magazines tell them that if the doctors say a condition is untreatable, they should shop around for a specialist, or bully the doctor into trying an experimental treatment and the insurance company into paying for it.
Notice her use of the word “bully”? Will patients be the bad guy once ObamaCare gets off the ground and a sufficient number of doctors sympathetic to ObamaCare’s directive are in the fold? Demanding excellent life affirming care will be seen as selfish and anti-state in the future.
In 2004 Dr. Fitzgibbons was asked about end-of-life care and whether a family or the doctor should decide when to pull the plug. She stated, “The older I get, the less patience I have with families who try to prolong the suffering of people they claim to love. Our job is—and has been ever since Hippocrates wrote his oath—to act ‘for the benefit of the sick.’ Letting even the patient’s family prevent us from doing this is a violation of both duty and compassion.” Claim to love?
To be fair, Dr. Fitzgibbons isn’t calling for British style end-of-life care, but when you add up the evidence it is apparent that end-of-life rationing and medical rationing for Americans as a whole is the goal. Clearly the LA Times is for ObamaCare in full, during the health care debate the paper consistently ran articles with titles like “Wow. Even for insurers, this is evil”, now the paper is printing articles by avowed end-of-life rationers. You make the connection.
Look for more articles and “experts” in the future to call for end-of-life rationing on the basis of people or families being “selfish” or we as a society “can’t afford it.” The slow push for rules and regulations that take the decisions for health care out of the hands of the family and put them into the hands of good state loving doctors like Dr. Fitzgibbons and government bureaucrats has seemingly begun.
Rationing and death panels may be a reality after all.
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John Romano is the publisher and editor of Yes, But However!, a musician, a former political correspondent for BBC Radio London, and a serial web entrepreneur. Follow him on twitter: twitter.com/yesbuthowever or John Romano on Google+John Romano article archive.
