Kitzhaber and Reinhardt on life, death and Congress
The Christian Science Monitor
April 04, 2005
Congress’ implicit healthcare rationing
By John Kitzhaber
As an emergency physician and former governor, I am struck by the towering contradictions - and indeed the hypocrisy - in the controversy over the tragic plight of Terri Schiavo. On the same day that the US House of Representatives voted to involve the federal courts in her case, it also approved a 10-year $92-billion cut in Medicaid funding - $30 billion deeper than the cut recommended by President Bush.
The relationship between these two decisions - virtually unreported by most media - goes to the very heart of why we’re unable to resolve the growing crisis in our healthcare system. While involving the federal courts in an attempt to save the life of one highly visible individual, Congress made a fiscal decision that will deny thousands of other Americans timely access to healthcare, some of whom may die as a result.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0404/p09s02-coop.html
And…
The Daily Princetonian
April 1, 2005
Seeking to understand life, death
By Uwe Reinhardt
Terri Schiavo dies, reads the Washington Post’s news alert on my desktop. After gradually starving her to death, in accordance with American law and our jurists’ interpretation thereof, Schiavo finally has left us.
Unwittingly, she has helped us understand, once again, what a confused, ill-informed, sometimes opportunistically cynical, but ever bizarre nation we are.
Let us start with the seemingly pious politicians and pundits who saw in this case an opportunity to proclaim the sanctity of human life. Really? In a recent series of books on the plight of the millions of Americans without health insurance, the medical and social scientists working with the prestigious institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reminded the nation that 18,000 people die each year as a direct result of the lack of health insurance, making it the sixth leading cause of death among people aged 25-64, after cancer, heart disease, injuries, suicide and cerebral vascular disease, but before HIV/AIDS or diabetes. The nation’s infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the OECD nations. Citing the CIA Fact Book 2005, economics professor Alan Krueger reminds us in The New York Times (March 31) that our infant mortality rate is higher even than Cuba’s.
It can fairly be asked what the pundits and politicians who waxed so pious on the sanctity of Schiavo’s life have ever done to avoid this tragic, avoidable loss of human life in the rest of America. If we searched their records, we would discover that many and probably most of them either have countenanced that loss with equanimity, doing little to avoid that loss, or, worse still, have opposed as “socialism” any attempt to provide health insurance to all American children and, indeed, to all people living in this land.
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/04/01/opinion/12531.shtml
Comment: For Congress to hear, voices must speak.