A New York City hospital has explicitly instructed its ER doctors to “withhold futile intubations” and that they have the sole discretion for that decision and the decision to use a ventilator on any particular patient.

What draws my attention to this order is that ER doctors have always had triage authority in their decisions regarding use of limited resources when potentially lethally injured or sick patients arrive in numbers that could overwhelm those resources.  New York State’s triage guidelines, in particular, were established in 2015.

What are this hospital’s administrators hinting at?