Rational Rationing.

Bioethicist Jacob Appel, writing at HuffPo, notes the recent Bentacourt case in New Jersey of futile care and distinguishes between rational rationing and irrational rationing. He writes:

The facts underlying the case are indisputably tragic. In 2008, Betancourt underwent cancer surgery at Trinitas Regional Medical Center, a Roman Catholic hospital in Elizabeth, and later suffered an irreversible anoxic brain injury when his breathing tube became displaced. By 2009, the seventy-two year old was unconscious, kept alive by a ventilator, artificial kidneys and tube feeds. Infected ulcers covered his body. Unfortunately, the patient left no advance directive stating what he wanted done under such circumstances. The team of physicians treating Betancourt determined that he was in a vegetative state and, reportedly in consultation with the hospital's ethics committee, sought to forgo extraordinary forms of therapy, such as dialysis and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Betancourt's daughter, Jacqueline, who rejected the medical team's view that providing such treatment to her father was merely prolonging the dying process, then obtained a court order for additional care. While the hospital appealed on the grounds that continued interventions were both medically inappropriate and unethical, Betancourt died. However, as the questions raised by this tragedy are likely to arise again in other end-of-life cases, New Jersey's Superior Court is expected to issue an opinion in Betancourt v. Trinitas that will clarify whether physicians and hospitals may refrain from providing costly care that they believe to be unconscionable.

For much more on the case and the potential ramifications of the court's decision, read details at Thaddeus Pope's site Medical Futility Blog. Pope was a witness in the trial. He also discusses Appel's article at HuffPo.

Appel takes a lot of grief from the likes of Wesley J. Smith for his "practical" approach to allocation of medical resources. In the post Appel writes (and I quote a lot because I think it is important, particularly his clarification of how the definition of death has changed, something I write about often):

There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery. Money spent on vegetative patients is money not spent on preventive care, such as flu shots and mammograms. Each night in an ICU bed for such patients is a night that another patient with a genuine prognosis for recovery is denied such high-end care. Every dollar exhausted on patients who will never wake up again is a dollar not devoted to finding a cure for cancer. While the visible victims may draw the headlines and attract indignant protests from so-called "pro-life" organizations, the invisible victims are people like you and me who will suffer from diseases that are never cured because funds are being poured down a healthcare sieve in order to maintain permanently-unconscious bodies on complex and costly forms of life support. I suspect that the vast majority of people, not knowing in advance whether they will either end up in a permanently vegetative state or be diagnosed with cancer, would prefer that any resources that would be spent on PVS care be reallocated to cancer research--or some similar enterprise that has the potential to help human beings who might actually recover.

The stark reality is that modern end-of-life ethics are on a collision course with themselves. As technology enables people to remain "alive" on ever more complex equipment, such as bilateral ventricular assist devices and extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation machines, the line between life and death blurs. Soon enough, a patient may be able to remain on such apparatuses for many months, long after meaningful brain function has ceased, until his skin and tissue begins to putrefy. When does such an existence transcend the barrier between living and dead?

Those who favor funding unlimited care for PVS patients tend to view the difference between these cases and other severe illnesses as a matter of degree. As a result, they worry about a slippery slope that might ultimately result in our pulling the plug on the cognitively intact but disabled. Yet PVS patients should instead be viewed as different in kind from other medical cases. In essence, the Betancourt court can decide that physicians and taxpayers only have a duty to provide unlimited care to patients who have a meaningful chance of returning to consciousness. Let us make no mistake about what this would mean: It would mean declaring that the lives of PVS patients are worth less than those of others. Rather than shying away from this outcome, progressive bioethicists should have the courage to acknowledge and to embrace this proposition.