Dubya's 1999 Texas "death panel"
by clammyc
Wed Aug 12, 2009 at 04:26:21 AM PDT
The Advance Directives Act, a death panel in every sense of the word that then Texas Governor George W. Bush signed into law.http://tlo2.tlc.state.tx.us/statutes/docs/HS/content/htm/hs.002.00.000166.00.htmFocus on Section 166.046, Subsection E, which allows:
If an attending physician refuses to honor a patient's advance directive or a health care or treatment decision made by or on behalf of a patient, the physician's refusal shall be reviewed by an ethics or medical committee. The attending physician may not be a member of that committee. The patient shall be given life-sustaining treatment during the review.
So if a patient or his/her family don't agree with the physician, it goes before a board to decide the patient's fate. But wait, there's more:
If the attending physician, the patient, or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the individual does not agree with the decision reached during the review process under Subsection (b), the physician shall make a reasonable effort to transfer the patient to a physician who is willing to comply with the directive. If the patient is a patient in a health care facility, the facility's personnel shall assist the physician in arranging the patient's transfer...
So what happens if these Texas death panels end up winning - against the wishes of the family?
A person does not commit an offense under Section 22.08, Penal Code, by withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from a qualified patient in accordance with this subchapter.
Immunity from civil or criminal prosecution.more:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/12/765464/-Dubyas-1999-Texas-death-panel...............................
And heres Bill O'Reilly defending it!http://www.foxnews.com/... WINSLADE: And the ethics board — if the ethics board agrees with the physicians, then they tell the patient or the patient's representative that they are free to transfer the patient to another facility willing to take care of them, but that hospital and those physicians will not continue to be...
O'REILLY: OK, but very rarely does another hospital accept that kind of a patient, as you know. So it's almost a death sentence to get — if the — but I'm not disputing the law. I mean, if you have doctors and then it goes before a board and they say, look, you've got to go with the medical people — that was my Schiavo thesis in the beginning.
O'REILLY: But let me interrupt. Let me interrupt you here. You saw — we saw Wanda, and she's obviously distraught over it, anybody would be, but she doesn't believe in death and still feels the baby's alive. So I'm trying to say to myself, look, if the baby's going to die, there's no hope for the baby, as all the doctors said, the medical board, you know.
Do you have to then keep the baby alive because the mother won't accept the verdict? I mean, that's basically what it's about, isn't it?
The reason the child died was because the hospital...
O'REILLY: But he lived on a ventilator and wasn't going to get off it, according to the doctorshttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,151386,00.html
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