Legal Commentary

Rationing health care in a disaster

By Tom Kirkendall

If you read one article health care-related this week, make it this extraordinary Sheri Fink/NY Times Magazine article on the impossible choices that the heroic doctors -- including Dr. Anna Pou -- faced at the former Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in rationing limited medical and evacuation services for their patients during the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Ms. Fink summarizes the issues raised by the issues that Dr. Pou and her colleagues well:

The story of Memorial Medical Center raises other questions:

Which patients should get a share of limited resources, and who decides?

What does it mean to do the greatest good for the greatest number, and does that end justify all means?

Where is the line between appropriate comfort care and mercy killing?

How, if at all, should doctors and nurses be held accountable for their actions in the most desperate of circumstances, especially when their government fails them?

Interestingly, after the federal, state and local governments largely failed the doctors, other workers and patients at Memorial in the aftermath of Katrina, get a load of how the government forces acted once the decision was made to arrest Dr. Pou:

AT ABOUT 9 P.M. on July 17, 2006 — nearly a year after floodwaters from Katrina swamped Memorial hospital — Pou opened the door of her home to find state and federal agents, clad in body armor and carrying weapons. They told her they had a warrant for her arrest on four counts of principal to second-degree murder.

Pou was wearing rumpled surgical scrubs from several hours of surgery she performed earlier in the day. She knew she was a target of the investigation, but her lawyer thought he had assurance that she could surrender voluntarily. “What about my patients?” she asked reflexively. An agent suggested that Pou call a colleague to take over their care. She was allowed to freshen up and then was read her rights, handcuffed and ultimately driven to the Orleans Parish jail.  .   .   .

Read the entire article. Whose judgment do you trust more? Dr. Pou and her colleagues? Or that of those governmental officials who decided to arrest her?

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on August 31, 2009 (boomark / email).