Individual Liberty & Futilitarians

Wesley J. Smith writes in The Weekly Standard about the English patient who wants to live and has gone to court fearing he will not be fed because of Britain's system of health care rationing. He won in trial court but the General Medical Council and the British government are appealing the decision. My assumption had been that the situation faced by this English patient could not occur in our country but Smith suggests otherwise:

It would be a mistake to assume that Americans are safe from having life-sustaining treatment rationed like this just because we don't have a national health service. Burke is fighting a broader movement in the bioethics field, "Futile Care Theory," that is also gaining traction here. Futile care theory is a one-way street when it comes to patient autonomy and end-of-life care. Futilitarians assert that patients have an absolute right to refuse life-sustaining treatment but are not similarly entitled to insist that their lives be maintained. Indeed, under futile care theory, as under the NHS rationing approach, whether a seriously ill or disabled patient's request to be kept alive is granted depends on whether doctors and bioethicists see the patient's life as worth living and spending medical resources to sustain.

For the last several years American hospitals have been quietly promulgating futile care protocols that empower their ethics committees to authorize doctors to unilaterally refuse wanted care. These futile care policies are beginning to be imposed on unwilling patients and their families.

As is usually the case in such matters, the first victims are on the far margins. Thus, in Houston, Sun Hudson, a 5-month-old infant born with a terminal disability, was taken off a ventilator in March over his mother's objections based on a Texas law that defers to futile care theory. Under the law, once a hospital bioethics committee determines that the treatment should not be rendered, the patient or family has a mere 10 days to transfer the patient's care to another hospital. This can prove difficult in this era of managed care and HMOs, since the affected patients are usually the most expensive to treat. After 10 days without a transfer, the outcome is usually death following the unilateral withdrawal of treatment--as occurred in Sun Hudson's case.

In another Houston case, one with ironic echoes of Terri Schiavo, the wife of Spiro Nikolouzos wants tube-feeding for her persistently unconscious husband, based on his previously stated desire to live. But unlike Schiavo's, Nikolouzos's personal wishes are not deemed determinative: A hospital ethics committee voted to refuse to continue his tube-supplied food and water and ventilator support. He would have died, but a San Antonio hospital unexpectedly agreed to provide the care. Then its ethics committee also decided to cut off care, but Nikolouzos was transferred to a nursing home. For the moment, Nikolouzos is being allowed to stay alive. But the final decision about the matter isn't his wife's: Under futilitarian Texas law, it belongs to committees of bioethicists and doctors. (emphases mine)

Is this what can happen when our view of government erodes from believing that government's primary purpose is to protect individual liberty? Do we really want a system of political economy that allocates medical resources and services by relying on a committee of doctors and ethicists to decide if a person's life is worth living? Wouldn't it be better to leave such an evaluation and choice to each individual?