Stephanie Klick's Death Panels
By
James Scott Trimm
Back 1999, The Texas Legislature unanimously passed the
draconian Texas Advance Directives Act (TADA). Under TADA, when a doctor and a
patient (or his/her surrogate) disagree about appropriate end-of-life
treatment, the disagreement is taken before an ethics review committee.
TADA only provided a ten day period for the patient's family
either to find another facility to accept the patient or to obtain a court
injunction to extend their life. If no other facility will accept the patient
within the period of time and the family is unable to obtain a court
injunction, then the hospital is legally permitted to withdraw life
sustaining-treatment from the patient, and simply let them die, regardless of
their wishes, their living will, or the wishes of their family. Folks, this is one of those “death panels”
about you have been warned.
I have blogged literally for years about the evils of these Texas Death Panels. When
opportunities to reform this act have presented themselves, Pojman’s Texas
Alliance for Life has run interference.
For example in the 84th Texas Legislative session (2015)
Texas Alliance for Life actually supported House Bill 2351, which was supposed
to be a bill to reform these death panels, but in reality this Bill only
perpetuated the death panels.
Texas Right to Life wrote about this bill (Which Pojman and TAL supported):
HB 2351 by Representative Patricia Harless (R-Spring) will also be heard today in the House Committee on State Affairs. The stated purpose of HB 2351 is to reform hospital ethics committees (death panels), which currently hold unlimited power to remove medical treatment from patients after providing ten days notice to the patient or family. Under the current Texas Advance Directives Act, hospitals may remove life-sustaining treatments including a ventilator, dialysis, food, and hydration from patients, even if the patient or their family has expressed a desire to continue such care and treatment. Treatment can be withdrawn from any patient for any reason, including discrimination against a patient who is elderly, terminally ill, or disabled.
Rather than actually reforming the draconian ten-day law, HB 2351 instructs the hospital committees to write and circulate their own regulations about conflicts of interest for their own ethics committees about their own decisions on withdrawing treatment from patients. HB 2351 also instructs facilities to write and implement policies for withdrawing treatment from patients with disabilities. However, this section establishes yet another dangerous loophole through this provision by adding: “unless the disability is relevant in determining whether a medical or surgical intervention is medically appropriate.” HB 2351 does not actually provide specific details about what the policies should be, just that hospitals should adopt policies on these topics.
(Committee to hear dangerous bills masquerading as Pro-Life, April 8, 2015)
In defending their silence on the Pro-Life issue of the life of Chris Dunn,
Joe Pojman's Texas Alliance for Life (TAL) finally spoke. On their
Facebook page TAL wrote:
Many pro-life individuals have been gravely
concerned about the tragic case of Mr. Chris Dunn, a 46-year-old man who was
admitted into a Houston hospital in mid-October and was on a ventilator. Some
media accounts and a pro-life organization misrepresented the situation as one
in which the hospital intended to kill Mr. Dunn by removing the respirator that
was considered necessary to sustain Mr. Dunn's life. The claims were made that
the hospital had judged that Mr. Dunn's life was not worth living….
To help correct the record and to explain
the ethical issues involved with end-of-life care, Dr. Beverly Nuckols, a
family physician and board member of Texas Alliance for Life, and Deirdre
Cooper, our public policy analyst, authored the following article on Public
Discourse. We highly recommend every pro-lifer reads it [sic].
In defending Methodist Hospital’s Death
Panel’s decision to discontinue life-sustaining treatment from Chris Dunn, Nuckols
and Cooper wrote:
"It is entirely possible, even
plausible, that the doctors—and Dunn’s father, in his role as surrogate—could
have understood Dunn’s death as an unintended but foreseen side effect of a
morally legitimate object. That object, by their own profession, was to stop
the suffering caused by the treatment to sustain his life."
(Balancing the Rights of Patients and Doctors: Another Perspective on a Tragic Case; by Deirdre Cooper and Beverly Nuckols )
In the 87th Legislative Session a bill was
filed in the Texas House to end the Ten Day Rule with it's Death Panels,
in Texas. The Bill was HB2609 which was assigned to the Public Health Committee, chaired by Stephanie Klick. Klick
intentionally slow walked this bill, making sure that it "died in
Calendars". She held the bill 28 days before even giving it a hearing.
(By contrast she gave a hearing to HB2213 , a bill to protect exotic
animals, on day nine).
She then held the bill another two weeks before
bringing the bill back up to the committee for a vote. Even after that,
she held the bill two more weeks on her desk, before walking it down
the hall and submitting it to calendars. After 68 days, Klick finally
submitted the bill to calendars, knowing that by that point it would
"die in calendars", and never reach the House Floor! Klick slow walked
this bill do death, and guaranteed that death panels, like the one that
took the life of Chris Dunn, would continue in Texas.
It is no surprise that in the following election cycle, Klick earned the endorsement of Texas Alliance for Life.
This last session Klick authored and pushed thru her own bill (HB 3162), a bill which did not abolish death panels in Texas at all, but preserved them, merely extending the period before the death panel decision takes over, from ten days, to a mere twenty five days. That's right, Klick's supposed "solution" was not to eliminate Death Panels in Texas, but to preserve them, and only add a mere fifteen days to the lives of their victims! And for this the establishment is already singing her praises! Our thimble runneth over!
Texas still has death panels, and we can now
thank Stephanie Klick for continuing to have Death
Panels in Texas! They are now Stephanie Klick's Death Panels.
