Tag: hospitals

Hospitals at center of fight over liability protections in coronavirus relief bill

Some hospitals say the legal uncertainty is making them wary of resuming long-stalled elective procedures.

Hospitals are warning they will be slow to restart elective procedures like knee surgeries and colonoscopies without assurances from Congress they won’t get sued by patients and their own workers if they are infected by the coronavirus during those visits.

Powerful industry lobbies like the American Hospital Association pressing for relief in the next rescue package have gained a sympathetic ear from Republican leaders in Congress. They’ll be joining with a raft of other industries seeking legal protections, ranging from manufacturers to casinos, while facing opposition from Democrats concerned about stripping patients’ legal rights.

The dispute echoes past fights over tort reform and medical malpractice suits that pitted trial lawyers, unions and consumer groups aligned with Democrats against doctors and other health providers claiming they were swamped by frivolous lawsuits.

A lottery for ventilators? Hospitals prepare for ethical conundrums

While some states have ethics guidelines in place, there is no national standard for who gets access to scarce life-saving machinery.

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.