Modern Republican Party, meet Nutshell.
Via Atrios we learn that in 1999 Bush signed a bill that allows hospitals to remove the feeding tube (or whatever) from terminal patients, even against the family's wishes, if the family cannot pay for care. So Terry Schiavo, who very likely requested to be removed from her machines, simply MUST be kept on them. It's a moral imperative. God, or at least the people who think they speak for him, have said so. It's so important, in fact, that it's worth demolishing a few layers of separation of powers and instituting a pretty extreme level of Federalism.
But if you're in Texas and you're poor, you know, you can go fuck off and die.
Literally.
But if you're in Texas and you're poor, you know, you can go fuck off and die.
Literally.
5 Comments:
Yes, the Feds stepping into this case breaks down Federalism (or rather, the States' judiciaries) in all sorts of ways, but come on, the Federal Government has a long, dastardly history of casting judgement on life and death health matters formerly left to the states. Roe vs. Wade, anybody?
I'm so done with this case, though. I just got done watching the House vote on CSPAN and I was amazed that nearly 50 Dems voted for it. (5 GOPsters voted against, for the record. One of them could have been me! Were I a Congressman...)
Oh, and that Bush Texas Law Thingie doesn't surprise me.
Oh, and wait: Are you bothered by Bush's legal hypocrisy, or the Texas' law, which lets hospitals pull the plug on the braindead for financial reasons? Cause I personally am quite uniform on all this: I'm for pulling the plug on anybody who's a vegetable. That goes for Schiavo or the Texas braindead without life insurance.
Correction: The linked to stories only say that financial reasons *might* be the reason behind pulling the plug, not the reason (Not it should be any sort of reason, but still, there is a distinction). The actual Texas Law simply says the decision to pull the plug in certain situations is left up to the hospitals ethics committee and doctors.
I kinda like this law, actually, as it (technically speaking, perhaps not in practice) demands the decision be put in the hands of rational scientific experts.
The Texas law is not about brain dead people actually, just terminal cases. The baby that was killed last week because of this law was still conscious, he was just terminal and poor. This is why I find the hypocrisy so infuriating. I think a conscious but terminal person is more worthwhile than someone in a persistent vegetative state. This is same reason I don't think a cell cluster is a person. I have no problem killing things that can't think or feel. Be they pre or post human.
Well, I agree with you on saving the lives of the conscious, but apparently even scientists can't seem to agree on all this terminal vs. vegetable vs. brain dead business.
Of course, it doesn't help that both you and I are laymen, and we must therefore study these cases via the mainstream news and Internet. Which means we're always being subjucted to relatively dumbed down versions of all things scientific.
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