Weighing the True Costs and Benefits in a Matter of Life and Death

DO the poor deserve life support?" asks the economist Steven E. Landsburg in an article published under that title in Slate this month (www.slate.com/id/2133518/?nav=fo). The subtitle says: "A woman who couldn't pay her bills is unplugged from her ventilator and dies. Is this wrong?" Mr. Landsburg invokes "economic considerations" to suggest that the answer is "no."

Many commentators have attacked his argument as morally preposterous. Well, yes. But it is also economically preposterous. The two judgments are related. But before an attempt at explaining why, here are some details of the case, from the Slate article and the Dallas-Fort Worth television station WFAA:

The patient was Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old legal immigrant being kept alive by a ventilator as she lay dying of cancer last month in the Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Tex. Physicians offered no prospect for her recovery. She was hoping, however, to hang on until her East African mother could reach her bedside.

Ms. Habtegiris had little money and no health insurance. On Dec. 1, hospital authorities notified her brother that unless another hospital could be found to treat his sister, Baylor would be forced to discontinue care after 10 days. But even with Baylor's assistance, the family was unable to find a willing hospital. True to its word, Baylor disconnected her ventilator on Dec. 12, invoking a law signed in 1999 by George W. Bush, then governor of Texas. The law relieved doctors of an obligation to provide life-sustaining treatment 10 days after having provided formal notice that such treatment was found to be medically "inappropriate."

Άρθρο του Robert Frank στο NYTimes...η συνέχεια...