A decade ago, Republicans warned that Obamacare would result in death panels, but it is the deep red state of Idaho where the death panels have arrived.
Idaho is rationing care and picking who lives and dies.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare made the announcement after St. Luke’s Health System, Idaho’s largest hospital network, on Wednesday asked state health leaders to allow “crisis standards of care” because the increase in COVID-19 patients has exhausted the state’s medical resources.
Idaho is one of the least vaccinated U.S. states, with only about 40% of its residents fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Only Wyoming and West Virginia have lower vaccination rates.
Crisis care standards mean that scarce resources such as ICU beds will be allotted to the patients most likely to survive. Other patients will be treated with less effective methods or, in dire cases, given pain relief and other palliative care.
Idaho’s solution to COVID is death panels.
Rationing care is a professional way of saying that doctors will now have to pick who gets to live and die because the state doesn’t have enough healthcare resources to care for the number of unvaccinated people who have gotten COVID and require care.
None of this had to happen. Republicans and Donald Trump politicized pandemic mitigation efforts, and the result is that people are dying because there are not enough hospital resources to care for them all.
Not all of the people who will die in Idaho and other states that will have to ration care will die from COVID. A person who could normally from something common like a heart attack, a stroke, or even appendicitis will likely die because of the decisions of others not to get vaccinated.
Republicans listened to Trump, and the death panels have arrived.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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