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Originally Posted by Troubleshooter
For myself, I'd want to to have a window of say a month to allow for testing and hypothesis. After that, without a plan, pull it.
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I might pick a month or two longer to be sure, but I agree with you. This past week I downloaded a living will. Marci and I are going to fill ours out, our friends are going to fill theirs out, and we will act as each others witnesses.
If you look at the Nazi's T-4 euthanasia program, you can see where the line goes to murder. If you look at Terri Schiavo, you can see where the line maybe went too far the other way.
I don't want to bring money into it, but one reason for the Texas Futile Care Act amending the
Texas statutes was economic. Health care providers did not want to be responsible for terminal patients.
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(e) If the patient or the person responsible for the health
care decisions of the patient is requesting life-sustaining
treatment that the attending physician has decided and the review
process has affirmed is inappropriate treatment, the patient shall
be given available life-sustaining treatment pending transfer
under Subsection (d). The patient is responsible for any costs
incurred in transferring the patient to another facility. The
physician and the health care facility are not obligated to provide
life-sustaining treatment after the 10th day after the written
decision required under Subsection (b) is provided to the patient
or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the
patient unless ordered to do so under Subsection (g).
....snip
(f) Life-sustaining treatment under this section may not be
entered in the patient's medical record as medically unnecessary
treatment until the time period provided under Subsection (e) has
expired.
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Now if a family is willing to pay, the good news is that there will be someone to care for that patient until the money is gone. And under our new bankruptcy laws, it will be easier to borrow against the house and all other assets for treatments because lenders will now be assured that there will be no chapter 7 and that they will be able to foreclose.
The thought that I might be in a PVS for years and that my wife would flush everything down the tubes towards the nonexistant possibilty of my recovery really scares me.
I know how the pope felt about all of this, but it would have been interesting to see the Vatican respond to him being in a PVS for 15 years. My understanding is that it is a lifetime appointment, so I guess that no new pope could have been elected. Here in the US, we can probably keep a large number of people alive indefinitely if they do not have a degenerative condition like cancer.
The reason that the term 'medically unneccesary' treatment is in that law is that even the most pro-life doctors have some point at which they know that the treatment will not help.