Actually, Texas under George Bush came up with a pretty good formula that could be applied to Medicare:
... the Texas law lays out procedures for physicians to follow when they think a patient's condition is hopeless, even if family members disagree. Doctors can make a case to their hospital's ethics committee. If the ethics committee agrees, life support can be removed.But first, dissenting families are given 10 days to find another facility willing to care for the patient.
"That was a law that President Bush did not just allow to become law without his signature. He came back from a campaign trip to sign it," Wasserman Schultz said.
The White House countered that the bill added patient protections that had not previously existed in Texas law, such as the 10-day waiting period and the hospital ethics panel review. McClellan said that Bush had vetoed a 1997 bill that would have afforded a patient no such protections.
"Prior to that legislation being passed, I think there was a 72-hour period where if the hospital notified a patient, or the family that represented the patient, that they were going to deny life-sustaining treatment, then they had just that 72-hour period to find a place to transfer the patient that would provide the treatment," McClellan said.
Former Democratic Texas Rep. Glenn Lewis, the law's principal author, said he wrote the bill after consulting with a group of physicians and court-appointed guardians for the terminally ill.
"We were trying to make it easier for everyone," said Lewis, who is now a Fort Worth lawyer. "We tried to write a comprehensive piece of legislation that accounted for everyone's interest."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0322-03.htm
Just come up with some formulas and apply them rigidly. |
