There is no national pandemic making a shortage of hospital beds. If one were to develop and they want to plan for it, they should be planning for how to handle the need - shipping people out of state if necessary, opening temporary clinics, more use of home health care.
So you see no point in contingency planning? Seems to me that the time to plan is before the emergency hits. I can understand disagreeing with this particular priority scheme. But I can't understand being opposed to contingency planning.
As for alternatives, were there a "national pandemic," then shipping out of state would not be an option. Even if it were, transporting a lot of patients long distances by ambulance, in many cases air ambulance, would be a monumental expense even assuming the ambulances and staff could be made available, which is unlikely. That's just not a feasible option.
Temporary clinics would be cheaper and somewhat more feasible but I don't know where they would get the personnel to staff them under emergency conditions. Under emergency conditions, staffing for hospitals would be reduced by illness and there aren't a lot of unemployed professionals out there that could be brought in to fill the hospital vacancies let alone the temporary clinics.
So we are left with home health care, which is in effect what this plan calls for. They send home certain categories of people so they can admit certain other categories of people to the hospital. In effect, the plan is within the parameters that you offer, and therefore shouldn't be an issue for you other than their priorities for classes of patients.
I see it as evidence of an eagerness to start killing people for convenience.
They're sending them home, not euthanizing them. Sure, some might die as a result of insufficient hospital facilities, but that would happen under any scheme. If they use a FIFO scheme, then some flu patients turned away might die. Either way, some might die. The only way to avoid caring for some at home rather than in a hospital is to have sufficient surplus hospital beds and staff to cover any emergency, which would be a monster cost. Is that what you want?
Seems to me that, before yelling "death squad," you have to identify a feasible alternative. If you prefer to give preference to terminal patients over critical flu patients, that's one thing, but that's the only feasible option you have. Either way you risk deaths. If you choose sacrificing the critical flu patients in favor of the terminal patients, how is that less of a "death squad"? |
