When a group of doctors, ethicists and religious leaders got together to write New York’s 2015 ethical guidelines for allocating ventilators in a pandemic, they coalesced around a clear principle: Scarce resources should go to the person most likely to be saved. But they had to contemplate another, tougher, situation: What if a number of patients were equally likely to benefit?
In that case, they decided, a lottery might be the fairest option.
The specter of such extreme rationing – a large number of critically ill patients confronting a finite supply of life-saving machinery – was grim but theoretical when debated by the philosophically minded panel. Now, as New York and other states gird for the possibility of a shortage of ventilators, that ethics roadmap could come actually into practice. Continue reading.