This is just where we are,
or soon will be.
I won’t be taking an others hospital bed during this crisis.
I have a hard enough time just standing in line.
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I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother.
Almost all of us find ourselves in your situation.
It fucking sucks.
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They are making life and death decisions, and taking away the right of you and your family to do so. Yes, that is a key concept for authoritarian, especially fascist governments.
But they are not mandating who can or can’t get care in that case.
The doctors are making those decisions. If those decisions need to be made, it should be made by the people who are informed enough to make that decision. Gov. Ivey is not that person, nor is the Alabama legislature. A blanket declaration that those with severe mental retardation, etc, does not allow doctors, the people with the actual knowledge to make those choices, to do so.
And as it’s Alabama, this will hit the rural, blacker population harder.
We give up our rights at our peril. Doctors need to be making these informed choices, NOT Ivey, not the Alabama legislature. We know that history, we know how they will use that power.
Right, and even in teh current environment, it should be.
I’m not saying it’s not a hard needle to thread, I’m saying we need to thread it, or it will change things in a way that we can’t come back from.
Thank you.
Good luck. I know this will be hard.
I’d argue that put into the hands of partisan politicians, that ends. There is no reason to believe that a directive, developed by political actors is any MORE rational than people concerned about it. I want people who are medically informed making those decisions, not politicians who have shown how little they care about the well fair of some people in their state with regards to life and death decisions in a normal time. If that’s “overly emotional” so be it.
Yes, we should all be doing this if entirely possible. The more we do, the better chance we have to get through this with our democracy intact.
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I think this article bears some thought with regards to this current situation:
This paragraph especially sums up the main thrust of the argument:
It is true that some level of natural hazard is unavoidable. There’s likely nowhere on Earth that is immune to all natural hazards: earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, drought, etc. But when we say that a disaster is natural, it lets us off of the hook from doing anything to prevent its worst effects. It allows us to avoid planning for hazards, and to pretend that the awful collision of people and the forces of nature is inevitable.
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Let’s say the family would like to take a loved one off a respirator/ “pull the plug” or an individual chooses to commit suicide. Frequently, states will not let these things occur. Do we live in a fascist state because we deny people the opportunity to terminate their own lives?
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Don’t get me wrong, I would never trust the Alabama legislature with any decision more important than their own lunch trays. Gov. Ivey even less.
On the other hand, the DPH is mainly composed of very serious, underpaid professionals who accept the lousy pay and what rolls (or floods) downhill on them out of a serious determination to do the best they can for the people of Alabama despite that. My (late) mother was in a related role in Arizona and my daughter is near ground zero in another State’s department of health. Those departments are responsible for nitty-gritty guidance documents that collect and boil down the data from (for instance) Italy’s differential prognoses given various signs, symptoms, tests results, and history.
In this case, one of those indicators is mental status. Which I am sure will be given due consideration along with viral load, BP, O2 sat, serum Troponin-T assay, date of symptom onset, tidal volume, and who knows what else (I’m an engineer, not an intensivist.)
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Whataboutism is not a well-received form of argument around here, and you are dangerously close to derail in demanding a precise, all-contingencies-covered definition of fascism.
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Not allowing individuals to make medical decisions for themselves is indeed authoritarian in nature. So is banning abortions, for that matter, as it takes away a women’s right to bodily autonomy. The state in between us as individuals and our doctor is authoritarian.
Yet advocates for people with intellectual disabilities are expressing concerns, and I’d suggest they might have a point here. They are concerned with vagueness in the language that gives a blanket designation. What does “cognitive difficulties” mean, exactly and who do we apply that to? People with higher functioning downs syndrome or autism?
Over and above all of that, we should have been prepared for this. We had the time and the ability to do so, but decades of GOP assault on our public infrastructure (at both the state and federal level) have screwed us all. We have the ability to have a robust health care system that might be taxed in situations like but can cope with them. Again, there is no such thing as a natural disaster.
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Ugh; this thread and some of the folks actually defending the idea of fuckin eugenics.
Because make no mistake; that’s exactly what hoping/planning for the “undesirables” to die off is, whether anyone wants to admit it or not.
If you think its ‘okay’ that someone else is allowed to die just because they are not an ‘ideal human specimen’, there’s only one thing I can say about you without violating the terms of service;
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I’ll not hold my breath on that.
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“Severe or profound mental retardation” - IQ of <35. Which is to say, more than 4 standard deviations below the average. This isn’t just someone who’s slow at learning. It’s someone who doesn’t understand the doctors are trying to help them. They require significant assistance from a caregiver, forever.
“catastrophic neurological complications such as persistent vegetative state” - someone who in all likelihood will never have cognitive function, especially if they’ve been in that state long term.
Someone is going to die because we don’t have enough ventilators. Medical professionals can’t save everyone. So, do we choose the guy who has a family to go home to, or do we choose the guy who is never going to wake up? It’s a trolley problem.
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Um…
Who the actual fuck is "WE?
Are you personally a medical professional on the front lines of this pandemic, actually tasked with making these awful decisions?
If not, then there is no “we” applicable here.
I fully understand that people are going to die and tough choices are going to need to be made.
What I can’t truck with is some other people’s glib attitudes about this horrible reality like it’s “no big deal,” likely because they just assume that they will never on the short end of the stick.
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Maybe we can round them up and drive them around in specially created vans made for the purpose of taking “care” of them… After all, their lives aren’t really contributing to the value of the stock market or anything important like that… /s
We should have ensured that we were going to have enough SEVERAL months ago. We knew this was coming, and we had time to prepare. The right wing government made sure that we were NOT prepared.
This is not a philosophical wank, it’s real human beings with real lives. Just because someone have decided that their lives are not meaningful, doesn’t mean that’s the case.
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First the Holocaust-sized human sacrifice for this quarter’s Dow.
Now death for those who aren’t Useful to the Race (and you know who’s going to be fast-tracked for death).
Amazing just how quickly the MAGATs have gone Full Nazi.
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Funny how gleefully eugenicists engage this thought experiment.
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As if morality in the real world is every so elegantly simple…
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This is what pisses me off. How many trillions did the US spend on nuclear weapons and missile development? And how many digits beyond the decimal would you need to express the percentage of that money that could have been put into rubber gloves, masks, ventilators, and ICU beds to plan for a SARS type pandemic? 0.01%? 0.00001%
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Fuckin’ A, and I genuinely pity anyone with their heads so far up their own asses that they can’t or won’t see it… until someone that they personally care about gets sick or dies, of course.
Then, suddenly shit becomes “real” to them.
Newsflash, muthafuckas; shit has always been ‘real’, it’s simply that you’re just now fuckin’ noticing.
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