Dueling Texas Futile Care Bills Once Again Cause Gridlock

I wrote earlier about my worry that two competing bills filed in Texas about the state’s discriminatory futile care law—one to put on a few bows of surface reform, the other to end the right of hospitals to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment—would end up in gridlock. This wasn’t prescience, it was precisely what happened two years go.

Alas, history is repeating itself. From the story:

Those who want to extend the time some hospital patients may live before their life support is cut off are worried that their proposal is running into a wall at the Capitol. Legislation by state Rep. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, would require life-sustaining treatment to continue for patients whose condition is deemed futile by doctors until a transfer to another medical facility can be arranged, if their family requests it.

Currently, hospitals can stop life support after 10 days in certain cases if the patient is terminally or irreversibly ill and cannot express treatment wishes. “No other state in the country has a law that Draconian,” Hughes said. “The balance of power is completely shifted against the patients and the families.”

Extending the time families have from ten to more days—as the phony “reform” bill would do—would accomplish nothing other than to validate futile care theory. More to the point, it would be an almost pointless exercise since Texas hospitals seem to have a tacit understanding that they will honor each other’s futile care determinations. If that is true, it wouldn’t matter whether the time was ten days or six months. What is required is for hospitals that wish to overrule patient/ family values be required to continue treatment pending transfer—otherwise as cost containment becomes increasingly the watchword, the futile care law could be used to dump patients due to their expense of their care.

But the medical establishment wants their raw power to tell patients and families, in effect, “We reserve the right to refuse service,” to remain unimpeded. And catch the typical disingenuous misdirection of the law’s defenders:

While critics call the Texas law extreme and restrictive, doctors and hospitals describe it as useful and unique. Among other things, doctors say, it addresses the details of advance medical directives and holds officials accountable for honoring living wills.

“We knew it was a groundbreaking statute. It does so many neat things for patient care,” said Dr. Robert Fine of Dallas, who testified against the bill. He represented the Texas Medical Association and Baylor Health Care System.

No, the part of the law under attack permits physicians and bioethics committees to overrule patient advance directives. As for establishing “so many neat things for patient care,” that is true—if you believe in the duty to die.

The time has come to litigate this injustice vigorously, and for lawyers to get into the files of these hospitals and bioethics committees and expose the dirt!