Death Panels, Right!

Death panels! "Bah hum bug, that's just right-wing extremists rhetoric!" you say?
Read this from the Colson Center's December 22 Breakpoint Daily. This is the inevitable consequence of letting the government act as our "health insurance" company.
Curt
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Who Decides to End a Life?

Remember when those who worried about “death panels” were mocked? Well, it’s no joking matter now.

 JOHN STONESTREET

Imagine you’re the mom or dad of a 46-year-old former sheriff’s deputy who’s been in the hospital for two months after a non-cancerous mass was found on his pancreas. Imagine further that your son is on a ventilator but can still interact with you and make his wishes known via movements of his hands or head. Imagine that in these interactions your son has clearly said he wants to live. Then consider your son had no health insurance when he went to the hospital, and now, a hospital “ethics committee” has decided it’s time to pull the plug, because further treatment is not “in the best interest of the patient.”

Unfortunately, this is not a bad dream for Evelyn Kelly, who’s fighting desperately to save the life of her son, Christopher Dunn.

Dunn is at Houston Methodist Hospital. Under the Texas Advanced Directives Act, Houston Methodist has decided to withdraw life-sustaining treatment. His mother is taking the hospital to court, saying the law is unconstitutional. “They want to kill my son,” Mrs. Kelly says. They say there is nothing else they can do for him, but I don’t believe that. When they found out that Chris did not have insurance, they said they were done.”

The Act, which was signed into law in 1999 by then-Governor George W. Bush, allows hospitals to withdraw life-sustaining treatments if an ethics committee agrees that further treatment is futile. Their only responsibility to the family is a written ten-day notice. The ethics committee for Houston Methodist gave its imprimatur earlier this fall, and the hospital defended itself by saying, “Houston Methodist is a faith-based, values-centered organization that strives to make the best choices for all our patients. End-of-life decisions are never easy, but Texas law is clear about our hospital’s responsibility in these cases.”

It’s hard to see how euthanizing Christopher Dunn is the best choice for Christopher Dunn! In fact, in a video distributed by Texas Right to Life, Christopher Dunn clearly indicates he wants to live. The organization is also circulating an online petition that in part says, “We demand that this secret and unaccountable decision-making by a bureaucratic committee—obviously motivated by its own financial interest—be reversed immediately so that Christopher Dunn can continue to live.” Come to our website to see this video and sign this petition.

And there are others shocked by the hospital’s violation of the Hippocratic Oath who have also joined the fight. Prominent disability rights activist Mark Pickup, who is chronically ill with degenerative multiple sclerosis, is asking Texas Governor Greg Abbott to intervene so Christopher can be placed in another facility. As Pickup notes, “The Governor can commute death sentences of murderers on death row. Surely he must be able to commute the death sentence imposed on a helpless man by the terrible Texas Advanced Directives Act!” Well, you’d think so.

But we must ask ourselves, how did it even come to this point, where people have to appeal to governors and so-called “hospital ethics committees” to keep hospitals from killing their patients? You know, Chuck Colson saw all this coming. He knew that turning over healthcare choices to the government would mean a bureaucratic panel—potentially more interested in cutting costs than saving lives—would be given the power over life and death.

As Chuck once said, “the only medical choices I’m interested in are the ones I make in consultation with my doctor and my family. Not with a government commissioner with tight budgets.’”

While U. S. citizens differ on the best way forward on providing healthcare for the nation, the fact is we should all agree that a hospital forcing a patient in its care to die is very, very wrong. Please come to our website for details on how to stand for Christopher Dunn’s life, and against a kind of death panel that, if unchecked, threatens all of us. And please, do it today. 

Who Decides to End a Life?: Saving Christopher Dunn

Here's something we can be proactive about when it comes to pro-life issues. Click here to get  information about signing the petition to save the life of Christopher Dunn.

Scalia a Racist? Hardly.

Attacking the Truth
By Thomas Sowell
Among the many sad signs of our time are the current political and media attacks on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for speaking the plain truth on a subject where lies have been the norm for years.
The case before the High Court is whether the use of race as a basis for admitting students to the University of Texas at Austin is a violation of the 14th Amendment’s requirement for government institutions to provide “equal protection of the laws” to all.
Affirmative action is supposed to be a benefit to black and other minority students admitted with lower academic qualifications than some white students who are rejected. But Justice Scalia questioned whether being admitted to an institution geared to students with higher-powered academic records was a real benefit.
Despite much media spin, the issue is not whether blacks in general should be admitted to higher ranked or lower ranked institutions. The issue is whether a given black student, with given academic qualifications, should be admitted to a college or university where he would not be admitted if he were white.
Much empirical research over the years has confirmed Justice Scalia’s concern that admitting black students to institutions for which their academic preparation is not sufficient can be making them worse off instead of better off.
I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University, and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.
These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.
Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.
The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.
That was a “favor” reserved for black students. This “favor” turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.
None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious academic problems trying to keep up at M.I.T., where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.
Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from M.I.T., and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom tenth of the class.
There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, rather than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.
Justice Scalia was not talking about sending black students to substandard colleges and universities to get an inferior education. You may in fact get a much better education at an institution that teaches at a pace that you can handle and master. In later life, no one is going to care how fast you learned something, so long as you know it.
Mismatching students with educational institutions is a formula for needless failures. The book “Mismatch,” by Sander and Taylor, is a first-rate study of the hard facts. It shows, for example, that the academic performances of black and Hispanic students rose substantially after affirmative action admissions policies were banned in the University of California system.
Instead of failing at Berkeley or UCLA, these minority students were now graduating from other campuses in the University of California system. They were graduating at a higher rate, with higher grades, and now more often in challenging fields like math, science and technology.
Do the facts not matter to those who are denouncing Justice Scalia? Does the actual fate of minority students not matter to the left, as much as their symbolic presence on a campus?