Ppl w/ intellectual disabilities could be denied life saving

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care under these plans in the USA.

https://www.propublica.org/article/peop ... jvg#181052

Some of this I tend to agree with, other parts not so much. Like the parts about people with severe debilitating cognitive issues/being in a vegetative state already etc, yeah, I can definitely see them getting a lower priority than a young healthy person. But blanket policies that could apply to anyone with an ASD diagnosis? Not so much on board with that.

Disability discrimination

Every patient should be treated the same.

I don’t agree with this and neither does pretty much every healthcare system, Doctor, and Nurse in the world.

When resources are limited, whether on the battlefield or in a state of the art hospital, decisions have to be made about who gets priority of care and who dies. Almost always it’s whoever has the best chance of survival and quality years left to live sort of thing. That’s reality.

I’m lucky I don’t have to make that choice.

This is exactly the dilemma Italian doctors had to make. Save ventilators for young patients or 80yr olds.....

Not just Italians.

It’s already beginning in Michigan hospitals. They’re prioritizing who gets ventilators and who gets pain killers for comfort. That apparently started there within the last 24 hours.

I think this part of medical ethics training when a doctor is faced with a resource shortage they base allocation on a hierarchy of needs (kind of a murky area that overlaps with sterilising disabled people etc)

And genocide.

Not really that murky most of the time. It’s just animal ethics, and we are animals, after all. The strong save the women and children, let the old, sick, and dying get eaten.

Yes, sometimes it gets complicated and difficult to decide. I read one news article that says some hospital systems defer to a panel of doctors/advisers who decide who gets treatment and who gets left to die so that doctors and nurses don’t have to make the call between their patients. I kind of like that approach for the difficult decisions.

You mean Darwinian philosophy to allow the "fittest" to survive at the expense of the weak?

The ethics committees in hospitals probably use "value to society" as a criteria which favours the physically able/functional over the disabled and the young over the old.

I would also imagine a ventilator would go first to a healthcare worker over lets say a lawyer

Yeah sure, a bit Darwinian.

No matter what way you slice it, medical resources and expertise are not infinite and there needs to be a system or protocol in place that determine how to distribute care.

s**t thing is for Americans that part of that decision making matrix is whether they’re insured or not or have money to pay, which have nothing to do with age or health factors. Crazy that they make those decisions all the time and don’t have some sort of serious ethical dilemma PTSD or whatever you want to call it as a result. Or maybe they do and just accept that as part of the job?