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News of the Day ... In Perspective09/21/2006Disability rights groups challenge Texas �futile-care law� If it had been up to her doctors, Kalilah Roberson-Reese would be dead by now. Instead, the 29-year-old brain-injured woman is sitting upright in a chair and responding to familiar voices, after transfer to a nursing home. Texas is one of two states that permits hospitals to give families a transfer-or-perish deadline. A hospital can withdraw �life support� in patients with no hope of recovery, after allowing families 10 days to find a facility that will accept the patient in transfer. Virginia, the other state with such a law, allows 14 days. Garnet Coleman, the legislator who coauthored the Texas Advance Directives Act, said that �ethically, a physician should not be forced to do harm to a patient by continuing treatment.� Jerri Ward, an Austin attorney who has authored several lawsuits to prevent doctors from ending treatment, said that �this law allows doctors and hospitals to abandon patients and provides them a safe harbor and immunity to do it.� In his view, medicine has changed its focus from saving lives to allowing doctors to make subjective quality-of-life decisions about who should die.� William Winslade, a lawyer specializing in medical ethics at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, said that �there are situations where it�s no longer medically appropriate to continue procedures that have no therapeutic benefit other than to prolong organic life� [emphasis added]. Disability-rights advocates suspect that hospitals often act on financial motives. More than a dozen cases like Roberson-Reese�s have surfaced, prompting lawmakers to hold hearings. Proposed amendments include lengthening the deadline and introducing independent mediators in cases in which hospital and families disagree (Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune 9/17/06). Additional information:
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