“In terms of conservative respect for individual liberty, Prof. Halper is wrong to force his values of requiring aggressive acute care for the dying on everyone because that violates the individual’s autonomy to choose between acute care or hospice care.”
This sentence misrepresents my article. I do not advocate “requiring aggressive care for the dying.” I am arguing against denying care to people who are not dying or, rather, would not be dying if they received minimal care. Specifically, I claim that families are encouraged to allow demented patients to die when treatments are available because doctors believe that the lives of demented have no value. Doctors should not be making these judgments. To allow patients to be treated is not to require aggressive treatment. I am against heroic and futile treatments. Anyone who respects individual rights, as Yockey claims she does, ought to allow individuals to be treated even if they are demented.
Obama wanted to do everything possible to help his grandmother. His attitude is entirely laudable. As he realizes, his own health care proposals may make this impossible. I am hardly in a position to say what was best for his grandmother, nor am I advocating aggressive treatment for those in her position. I want to preserve her ability to choose treatment if she wishes. Obamacare may deny her this option.
Yockey writes as if there are just two options aggressive, futile care and hospice. In fact, there is much that is in-between–a whole range of normal medicine and nursing care. It is these in-between options that need to be improved. Why send patients who can be easily treated to hospices? Why rule out nursing care outside of hospices? Eliminate futile measures, leave hospice care for those who are dying, respect life and freedom–surely, most of us can agree on these points.
Finally, a note on hip replacements. My mother-in-law waited for surgery for a broken hip for five days in a Canadian hospital. After she finally got the surgery, she had to endure the attending physician’s announcing, by her bedside, that a woman of her age (80) with a hip replacement could not be expected to live more than a year. (Thankfully, two years later, she’s still kicking!) This is only one of many horror stories about the Canadian health system that many Americans would emulate. Once “quality of life” and “expected longevity” are used to determine care options, we face the prospect of limited care and, eventually, euthanasia.
