The medical technocracy wants to cut costs on the backs of the severely disabled, elderly, and dying. One approach is futile care, which gives doctors the right to refuse wanted life-extending care based on quality-of-life judgments — even if a patient requested the treatment in an advance directive.
A recent policy statement on this issue by the American Thoracic Society explicitly grants doctors the right to refuse care that actually works (after an internal hospital administrative process). From the statement (my emphasis):
The term “potentially inappropriate” should be used, rather than “futile,” to describe treatments that have at least some chance of accomplishing the effect sought by the patient, but clinicians believe that competing ethical considerations justify not providing them.
Think carefully about that. The Thoracic Society, like Napoleon crowning himself emperor, granted themselves the power to refuse life-extending treatment, not because it doesn’t work, but because it does, based on their values about the patient’s quality of life or cost of care.
This all works hand-in-glove with Obamacare by justifying future Obamacare cost/benefit panels to make decisions allowing the loss of insurance coverage for efficacious treatments a doctor or hospital consider “potentially inappropriate.”
For more analysis, see my post over at Human Exceptionalism.