Dr. Total State
Posted on May 19th, 2009
by Sean Scallon |
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One of the dangers of nationalized health care (outside of the cost concerns) the potential explosion for litigation once health care becomes a right. Such litigation helped to increase health care costs from the 1980s onward and could make things more expensive in future, only this time its the taxpayers that will bear the brunt.
Not only could such litigation require hospitals and clinics to preform various surgeries, cosmetic or otherwise, regardless of their impact on the bottom line, but it can also force patients to receive certain treatments whether they want to or not. Judges and or juries become de facto doctors.
Examples of this are a couple of cases in the Upper Midwest, one in Minnesota and the other in Wisconsin, where a parents religious beliefs precluded them from getting medical treatments for their seriously ill children. The Wisconsin case is a little different for the parents are being charged with murder whereas in Minnesota, the still alive 13-year old is standing by his parents and refusing medical treatment.
Those who were repulsed by the state interference in the Schiavo case should also be concerned about the precedent that could be set in these two cases. If a court can force anyone into any kind medical treatment regardless of their own personal choice and hold you liable for murder if you don’t comply for religious reasons, or were unaware of how serious the problem was because seeing doctors is a mortal sin in your religion, as in the Wisconsin case, then the state can also make you get vaccinated for the next outbreak of Swine Flu. The state could theoretically force AIDS patients on to prescribed AZT schedules. The state could enforce a person to endure expensive surgeries for the public good. And if the court makes the boy in Minnesota have chemotherapy against his will, I doubt if Brown County, Minn. will be footing his medical bills.
Such cases have been in the legal system for some time but may become more common as the diverse country now has many residents who are more used to homemade remedies than IV units. Courts could very well dive into family disputes between those favoring more modern care against traditional methods or those who believe faith is the primary healer.
The state has already become our banker on top of being our policeman, our home builder and our farmer. Do we wish to add doctor to that growing list?
Filed under: Courts, Law, liberties
Spelled “precedent”–and it seems like these are relatively extreme cases; the court system, after all, needs arguably as much work as the healthcare system.
Sean:
I’d like to comment on a number of points in your fine piece, starting with what might be described as some of the “underbrush” of your major concern:
You jump issues a bit when talking about the state forcing someone to get some medical treatment but then talk as if it’s the same issue when the state says that someone should have gotten medical attention *for their child.*
It isn’t the same issue, just as the public recognizes so such as in the Schiavo case when it came to letting that woman die in accord with her own apparent wish, and just as it supports laws against child abuse and neglect by parents.
And when it comes to public health and the ability to tell anyone some things the state has always been seen as having rather extraordinary powers, for good reason as the Typhoid Mary case shows. Think of the government without the power to quarantine for instance. Especially in the age of viruses in which we are now immersed.
And these child neglect cases are different because nobody really believes that a person should be as free to treat their child the way they say they would treat themselves. Elsewise we’d have no laws against child abuse or neglect by their parents.
And this Wisconsin case you mention is instructive: These moron parents didn’t just “believe faith is the primary healer,” as you put it. (Which I don’t think makes any difference anyway.) They didn’t even believe faith was the only healer; just that faith was the only *justified* way of being healed. They were being “challenged” they thought to heal their child by faith alone, not that they didn’t believe she could be healed by medicine. So despite the pleas of relatives and others I believe, they let her slowly die when all she needed was some insulin shots. And these noble people now can’t even stand to sit and listen in their trials (as in the case of the mother) to the prosecutor’s stark description of her daughter’s sufferings. “Oh gee,” her lawyer essentially begs, she gets so distraught listening….” But not distraught apparently watching her daughter writhe away to death.
Screw them, I say, and screw any political party that wants to commit suicide and put itself on the side of parents who will let their child die for reasons like this. Hasn’t the devastation the fundamentalist religios wreaked on the Republican Party shown us what being in thrall to such people means?
And it would be all the more ugly if it was indeed the Republicans or so-called conservatives that took up this call. First, they come out in favor of the state telling a woman she can’t abort a fetus. But gee, so long as she claims God tells her it’s okay she can starve her fully born child to death or let it die for want of a pill? Yeah, right, that’d be a real crowd pleaser. The Republican Party would go from now merely being thought extreme to being thought genuinely insane.
I’d also note that the whole issue of to what degree faith is a defense against child abuse or neglect in the law has and is one that has and is being wrestled with in many many states already. For a decent article about same see:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121322824482066211.html
As I said for me I don’t give a fig if these sorts of nuts claim they think faith is the “primary” healer or the secondary or whatever and I’d charge the hell out of them. But as that Wall Street Journal article notes, and somewhat contrary to what your piece suggests, lots of states have given religious parents a lot more leeway than I’d give them, so the picture is a mixed one from anyone’s perspective.
Now, as to your bigger picture which is your concern that nationalized health care might lead to a litigation explosion. I think you overestimate the care that the liberals and the Left have about patients’ rights to allow this. Remember Hillary Clinton’s and Ira Magaziner’s plan? Brutal brutal ignorer of patient rights: Hell, you could go to jail for privately hiring a doctor if I remember right, and etc., etc.
From what I’ve seen the liberal/Lefty people pushing a big nationalized/socialized health care system know damn well that for it to work and for it to be anywhere near affordable it has to be almost Procrustean in its limitations, otherwise it will be undermined like crazy. In the very first place in some way shape or form it simply *has* to prioritize care and thus ration care too. And, like I understand Oregon’s plan is, it would already have to *start* doing so fairly distinctly, and it would only get worse.
So I suspect that what you’d see from all these bleaters about patient rights is if they get a chance to design a system one of the big aspects of it would be the outlawing of all kinds of suits and rights, and individual patients be damned. For instance, as regards perhaps the biggest health-care system innovation pushed by the health-care reformers in Washington in the last 50 years—HMO’s—you already can’t sue them no matter *what* they’ve done to you.
Or look at the British or Canadian system; lots less patient rights than we’ve got now I understand.
So you watch, if the liberals and Lefties get to pass the health-care system they want it’s gonna be just chock-full of provisions limiting rights. And if the government can give retroactive immunity to Telecom companies who illegally helped the government wiretap us, just think of the normal *proactive* immunities it can give.
You let Teddy Kennedy design a health-care system and the lawyers would be looking back at today as the halcyon period gone by I suspect.
Cheers,
I wonder who’s liable if the government forces a particular medical treatment (a vaccine, for example) on people and then it turns out that the treatment has some unfortunate and drastic side effects. I would guess that nobody would be held responsible. This would leave us in the position of being powerless over our own bodies and without recourse in the event that those who dared to assume power over us screw up really badly.
Tom
The state may very well have power to quarrentine in time of public health emergencies and yet you conviently forget that the state also at one time forced sterilization on poor mothers to keep them from having more kids.
Obviously the state’s power in the realm of public healty must be tempered by, to use an old phrase “great responsibility,”. For the slippery slope of state control of one’s health is not altogether steep one. If state interference in the Schiavo affair was revolting, why is it any less revolting for judge to order someone to undergo therapy he does not wish to undergo? And what’s the point of evening having parents if their beliefs or wishes for theirs dependents are totally ignored? The woman in Wisconsin may very well be deluded as her family members believe but does that put her on the same level as someone who beats their kids with an electric cord or burns them with cigarettes? How many jail cells have you built to house such people across the country.
It may very well be national health care systems put limits on one’s rights but that is not going to stop those who believe such limits infringe on their rights and will go to court to get them regardless who is in the White House. Trial lawyers are going to have a field day with our natrional health service and we’ll all be paying the price for everyone’s “rights”.
Finally, a state can allow the use of the abortion procedure, in my book, to protect the the health of the mother bearing the child, but not as a means of birth control through infanticide. There is no such right.
Sean wrote as follows:
“Obviously the state’s power in the realm of public healty [sic] must be tempered by, to use an old phrase ‘great responsibility.’”
With great modesty too; we agree totally.
“If state interference in the Schiavo affair was revolting, why is it any less revolting for judge to order someone to undergo therapy he does not wish to undergo? And what’s the point of evening [sic] having parents if their beliefs or wishes for theirs dependents [sic] are totally ignored?”
Ah but here again is where you conflate two different things; an individual’s choice and an individual parent’s choice over their child. And it’s a red herring to intimate that I’d “totally ignore” the parents’ “beliefs or wishes” wholesale.
What I’m in favor of is just about precisely what we have now which is that in the overwhelming main parents have the absolute right to inflict their beliefs or wishes on their children, up until the point it becomes neglect or abuse. And while of course there’s much parsing that can and has been done as to what those mean let’s take the case that you *yourself* picked since it’s clear you disagree with the prosecution:
Are you really truly saying that these parents, who let their child die a slow agonizing death in front of their own eyes, for want of a freaking shot or two of insulin, despite being plead with to get her medical attention and thus having information that same could help, should just be able to do that and not be prosecuted at all? Really? And you advocate some political party to support that position?
“does that put her on the same level as someone who beats their kids with an electric cord or burns them with cigarettes?”
No, not at all; another red herring: The law invariably distinguishes between degrees of culpability/evil/wrong/etc, and provides for same via different crimes and levels of punishments. Indeed, to even convict this woman the State will have to do more than just show she neglected her child and that in fact she did so with some bad “mens rea” or culpable state of mind too. So even that’s a threshold right there, and if she’s convicted there’s no doubt in my mind she will (rightfully) not be treated like a parent who murdered their child for fun.
So, again, do you really believe this woman ought to get off scott free merely because she wasn’t inflicting this torture on her child for fun?
As to our disagreement on the degree of litigiousness that a national/socialized health care system will entail I’m afraid we’ll simply have to remain in disagreement. As I said look at when Congress immunized HMO’s: Of course there was an initial challenge to its constitutional ability to do so, as well as attempts to get around it. Ask a medical malpractice attorney though and he’ll tell you; they all failed, there’s no real recourse, no litigiousness. There’s simply nothing they can do about it, and they ain’t about to waste their time and money litigating the impossible.
As I said I think you are granting those in favor of nationalized medicine too much concern about “patient’s rights” in reality. They’ve used the slogan to bludgeon anyone against their plans, but then you look at their plans and zowie, patients get screwed every which way from Sunday. (Which is proven by the grass-roots uprising against the last such attempted plan put forth by Ms. Clinton and Mr. Magaziner.)
Indeed, one of the big things I saw looking at one subsequent proposed very socialistic plan was to *drastically* put a cap on medical malpractice awards, because of course the plan no longer had someone *else* paying these awards, but the gov’t itself, and doing otherwise would have put the plan in jeopardy. Indeed it was said it simply *had* to be done for the sake of the viability of the plan.
In any event maybe you’re right and I’m wrong but indeed I suspect we’ll see because I do think, creeping or not, we are in for a nationalization of the system eventually.
Cheers,
I confess to getting lost in the verbiage and mutating issues addressed, but a few things by Sean and Tom B are so bizarre as to invalidate anything else they say.
The remark “repulsed by state interference in the Schiavo case” is truly in the twilight zone. The philandering husband wanted his helpless wife out of the way and so got her judicially executed, over the objections of the victim’s parents, who promised to bear all the expenses of her continued care. The scandal is that there was no state interference, just as there was no state interference in lynchings more than fifty years ago. Then Tom B compounds the nonsense by saying that Schiavo died “of her own apparent wish,” when the argument in support of the husband was that she was incompetent to wish anything. Society had no potential burden to bear, given the solicitous parents, so the rush to starve and dehydrate Schiavo to death was purely gratuitous and unworthy of a reputedly civilized society.
Tom B, however, is beyond parody, claiming that somewhere or other conservatives have no quarrel with the position that if “God says it’s okay..[the mother] can starve her fully born child to death.”
“The American Conservative” apparently will publish any slander against conservatives it receives, no matter how far-fetched.
John King wrote a number of things as follows:
“Then Tom B compounds the nonsense by saying that Schiavo died ‘of her own apparent wish,’ when the argument in support of the husband was that she was incompetent to wish anything.”
False. The argument in support of her husband, which the Court bought, was that she had previously expressed the desire not to be kept alive in a vegetative state.
“Tom B, however, is beyond parody, claiming that somewhere or other conservatives have no quarrel with the position that if “God says it’s okay..[the mother] can starve her fully born child to death.”
False again. Didn’t say that.
“I confess to getting lost….”
Yes, you did. And when you do you ought to refrain from abusing people who aren’t.
Cheers,
Terri Schiavo never wrote or was recorded saying that she would prefer euthanasia for herself. Her husband testified that she had said so, but that testimony is so self-serving as to be worthless. Several witnesses said that they had heard her say as much, but they were all sympathetic to Michael Schiavo, making their testimony dubious also. The parents denied ever having heard her make such a statement and thought it implausible that she would do so, given her religious beliefs.
Michael Schiavo never gave a sensible answer as to why he did not just divorce Terri and have done with it, saying in essence he could then not have worked to spare his poor wife the ordeal her fanatical parents wished for her. What a sweet, solicitous guy Michael was! Which is to say, what a heartless bastard Michael was, not content with being free of her but insisting that she be put to death.
Tom denies ever having subscribed to some conservatives’ acquiescence in letting parents starve their children to death with impunity. You said it in paragraph 8 of your screed above. Can’t you even read your own writing?
John King
John King wrote:
“Terri Schiavo never wrote or was recorded saying that she would prefer euthanasia for herself. Her husband testified that she had said so….
True. And while you obviously don’t, the Judge in the case accepted that same was her wish meaning that my original statement was indeed true also, and your previous one denying same was in error.
“Tom denies ever having subscribed to some conservatives’ acquiescence in letting parents starve their children to death with impunity. You said it in paragraph 8 of your screed above.”
Nope. Not only did I *object* to conservatives (or indeed anyone) being in favor of letting people starve their children to death, in said paragraph, I questioned the political sanity of conservatives “if” they did so.
Only a two-letter word, you must have missed it.
Cheers,
Whether the judge accepted Michael Schiavo’s testimony or not hasn’t the least bearing on its plausibility. Lots of judges are fools and scoundrels.
Yes, of course you question the sanity of anyone who would starve a child to death. But, your remark followed speculation about “Republicans or so-called conservatives” doing so, and insertion of the word “if” is a transparent dodge. Even you know the meaning of inuendo. If you weren’t targetting Republicans and conservatives, what earthly point was there in mentioning them in regard to this fanciful, repulsive scenario? It is all the more repulsive in this context, given Terri Schiavo’s death by starvation.
Cordially,
John King
I dunno why we’re fightin’ John since I don’t know that there’s a speck of substantive disagreement between us.
All’s I said originally as to Schiavo is that she was allowed to die due to “her own apparent wish” and I even used the word “apparent” to specifically note the questionable nature of same even though it was a Judge who discerned that wish. That doesn’t mean I agree with his finding, but I could hardly have failed to mention that same was indeed found, could I?
And I don’t see why you have a problem with me “targeting Republicans and so-called conservatives” by expressing my opinion that if they lined up behind someone who advocated allowing parents to starve their child to death or etc. they’d be politically insane.
The only thing I can think of is that you believe the Republicans and conservatives either already do or already should so line up, in which case I apologize for using the word “insane” even though it was obvious just a colloquial useage. I’d just amend my remarks to say that I think that would be a mistake because certainly anyone and everyone is entitled to disagree with me and certainly I’ve been wrong before.
Cheers,
Just a fewf points on the Schiavo case:
1. It was the parents’ idea that the husband…”date”
They have said in interviews they hoped encouraging him to date other women would result in his voluntarily relinquishing custody.
They did later try to use that against him in the litigation.
But since they had not merely acquiesced, but actively enouraged him to “date” other women the court did not find that a conflict of interest.
2. The parents said they would never remove the feeding tube, regardless of her wishes, even if they knew beyond a doubt she would not wish to continue with the feeding tube.
Under oath, they admitted they would go to any lengths to keep her alive, including amputation limb-by-limb, because they derived pleasure from her continuing to live.
Regardless of whether or not she herself would have chosen such extreme measures.
All the above is referenced in the December 2003 report of the final guardian ad litem.
3. Because of the above, when it came time for trial their testimony clearly had credibility issues, so they lost.
The parents’ position is understandable, but legally untenable.
No court deciding guardianship is going to take you seriously when you tell the court you’d ignore the wishes of the ward in favor of your own.