Death Panels or Triage?

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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?

Resistance to Change

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Matthew Hennessey, writing in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal commented extensively on the current Wuhan Virus (my term, not his) situation and its impact on education, specifically the forced switch to a measure of home schooling.

Many families have found themselves running pop-up homeschools. Most students will return to traditional classrooms when the crisis passes. But some families—perhaps many—will come away from this involuntary experiment with a new appreciation for home-based education. They may even decide that homeschooling is not only a plausible option, but a superior one.

It’s that last bit, coupled with the article’s subheadline, that drew my attention. That subhead was

Education has long been resistant to change, but it can’t dodge the pandemic.

Education can’t dodge the pandemic any more than any of the rest of us can.  But it isn’t education that’s resistant to change.  The rapidly increasing demand for voucher schools, charter schools, straight-up homeschooling, and other variants to providing education for our K-12 children demonstrates the error of that claim.

It’s the parents who are pushing for those changes, and they’re supported by a few politicians and a few State and local governments who are, if not pushing for these changes, at least are staying out of their way.

It’s many other State governments and especially teachers unions who are actively opposing these changes. It’s the managers of education systems who have been long resistant to change, and remain so. The consumers of education systems, and especially their parents, are clamoring for these and an unfettered expansion of these changes.

Making the Case

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Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) decried journalists’ touting America’s Wuhan Virus death rates as being greater than the People’s Republic of China’s.  “Grotesque,” he tweeted about it.  And he’s being generous, I say.

Naturally, journalists’ feelings were hurt by that, and they bellyached loudly.  Michelle Goldberg, for instance:

Journalists are concentrated in cities that are being ravaged by a plague that could have been better contained with a competent president. They’re lonely and scared and reporting while homeschooling their kids. No one feels glee or delight. Some of us feel white hot rage[.]

Taking advantage of the Wuhan Virus situation to attack the President, while carefully ignoring her fellows’ attacks of racism and xenophobia for the steps he did take early on. Sure.

Laura Bassett:

This tweet [Rubio’s “grotesque” tweet] is grotesque. Delete it.

There’s that censorship sewage so favored of journalists who can’t abide others disagreeing with them or their pre-established narrative. That so many other venues also favor this implementation of censorship in no way excuses these guys—who have a grotesque way of acting as our filters, our gateways, to information.

Sam Stein:

Senator, either you have no clue what you’re talking about or you’re being a jerk. I have friends in this industry who have the virus. We have to make exceptionally challenging calls about sending reporters into hot spots or places where they could get it. Do better[.]

Crocodile tears about friends whom he’s now fashioning into weapons for another attack on the President. Some friend. And his “exceptionally challenging calls” on what to cover? It’s his and his editor’s “challenging calls” to wholly ignore areas that aren’t hotspots; to wholly ignore recovery rates; and to choose to focus, ghoulishly, on body counts.

These wonders—every single one of them—make Rubio’s case, pretty dramatically.

State Governments and Socialism

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A current government move to control the means of production—classic socialism when the controls are widespread—is this, involving what’s left of our nation’s insurance industry, at the State level.

In at least three states, lawmakers have proposed legislation to force insurers to pay billions of dollars for business losses tied to government-ordered shutdowns.

Never mind what already agreed policies say. To Hell with signed contracts. Government men Know Better, and being above petty commitments themselves, can’t conceive the idea that commitments actually matter in a free society, in a free market economy.

Some regulators have declared moratoriums on cancellations and nonrenewals of policies.

This is Government assuming control of the insurance companies and dictating what they will produce.

Here is the blatantness of the power grab made manifest:

In Massachusetts, state Senator James [Jamie] Eldridge (d) said that the depth of the coronavirus pandemic has made bold legislative action a necessity. A bill he has proposed would require insurers to pay so-called business-interruption claims to small businesses even if policies contain virus exclusions.

Insurers get reimbursed later? No, they’ll have to apply to Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democratic government-appointed insurance commissioner for that, and the commissioner would be authorized to bill those same insurers, “possibly over years,” to cover the payouts. I am altering the deal; pray I don’t alter it any further.

Of course, all of this is for the best of reasons and soundest of motives. For some politicians, that’s actually true, too, regardless of the misguided nature of their actions.

For most, though, this is just another implementation of Progressive-Democrats’ mantra of never letting a crisis go to waste; they’re just too useful for expanding government power.

Progressive-Democrats and the Law

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And contracts.  Since the SARS epidemic of some years ago, insurers have declined to cover losses related to virus or bacteria damage, and they wrote their policies to that effect. State regulators—who controlled and still control the structure of insurance policies and the premiums allowed to be charged for those policies outside Obamacare—agreed.

However.

New Jersey Assemblyman Roy Freiman, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would retroactively rewrite interruption coverage contracts and force insurers to foot some losses for any policyholder with fewer than 100 full-time employees.

Contracts be damned. They don’t fit the Progressive-Democrat agenda, so by Progressive-Democrat-run Government fiat, they must be tossed.

Here’s the kicker, though.

Mr Freiman says he doesn’t know if he has the legal authority to do this, but he says he doesn’t care.

The law be damned too—it’s in the Progressive-Democrat’s way. Don’t get enough of his fellows in the legislature to agree with him and change the law. Don’t get actual voters to agree with him and so get legislators to stand with him to change the law.

No. The Progressive-Democrat already Knows Better; everyone should just get out of his way so he can toss the law without any silly delays from the ignorant unwashed.