CHICAGO, October 13 — Students, hospital workers, and patients’ family members gathered in the rain in front of Stroger Hospital of Cook County this morning to denounce the institutionalized murder of ventilator-dependent patients. “Does a system that kills its weak to save money deserve to exist? No, it does not,” one speaker said.
As public hospitals like Oak Forest Hospital (OFH) are being shut down here, the bosses have trained their sights on the last remaining patients — those too sick and dependent to escape on their own — transferring these patients to poorly-staffed, for-profit nursing homes.
In early September, Michael Yanul, a 58-year-old ventilator patient with muscular dystrophy, who had lived at OFH for 17 years, was forced tomove. At a nursing home called Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, Michael only survived three weeks before succumbing to pneumonia.
According to the national ratings Web site nursinghomerating.org, this 143-bed facility has an overall rating of one out of five stars. They have “widespread administrative deficiencies” and show a “pattern of quality-care deficiencies.” Among short-stay residents at that nursing home, 34% have bedsores and fewer than half received flu vaccine.
Another one of the long-term ventilator patients from OFH, David Moreno, 34, is particularly concerned about what happened to his former friend. Michael lived down the hall from David on the OFH vent unit. David suffered paralysis from a spinal cord injury 12 years ago and, like Michael, cannot breathe without a machine.
After OFH closed on September 2, he was moved to the Coronary ICU at Stroger Hospital until a long-term placement could be arranged. His social worker told him that the hospital administration plans to move him to Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, where Michael died last month. “I’m scared of going to that place,” he said in a recent interview.
By attacking the most vulnerable patients first, the bosses expect to desensitize workers and prepare the way for more murderous attacks. The Nazi Holocaust began as coordinated, hospital-based murders of physically and mentally handicapped patients (see box).
We distributed CHALLENGE and passed out flyers to patients and workers arriving for the morning shift, exposing the hospital administration’s plans to kill off the few remaining ventilator-dependent patients through deliberate decisions that result in completely predictable deaths.
Their calculations are straightforward. It costs nearly $3,000 a day to keep a patient on a respirator in the ICU. It costs about $2,000 in a high-quality long-term vent unit. It costs about $500 a day at the death-trap nursing home. In a year the administration can save enough to pay the salary of the new CEO, about $550,000.
Our picket line featured large photographs of three OFH vent patients, Michael, David and one other survivor, Posey Conley. Their large images looking directly at passers-by made a stark contrast to the cold financial calculations that administrators were making to sacrifice their lives for the budget.
Several nurses, technicians and other hospital workers came out for our actions even though they had never been to a protest before. They helped pass out flyers and chanted. They didn’t lose confidence even when the hospital police harassed us and threatened protestors with arrest. Eventually we moved about 40 yards away from the front door and resumed our picket. The husband of a patient joined the picket line. He grabbed the bullhorn in a spirited defense of his wife and every other patient who depends on public medical services, asking “This could happen to anyone — Who’s next?”
We collected names of new contacts and deepened our relationships with friends in this little skirmish. For years we have been talking about the development of fascism in society at large and in medicine in particular. Today it is right in front of us and we confronted it squarely. We made some modest gains; this fight is far from over. All workers’ lives are precious to our class. But none of our lives mean anything to the billionaires unless we can be used to make them richer. Their murderous system must be destroyed if workers are to live.J
Hitler’s ‘Euthanasia’: Medical Murder
The Nazi “Euthanasia” Program, 1939-1944
The gas chambers and other mass killing techniques that the Nazis eventually used to kill millions of Jews and others were developed on Germans living in chronic-care public hospitals.
Dr. Leo Alexander, a Boston neurologist and psychiatrist, was called as a special expert witness to testify before the Nuremberg tribunal investigating the actions of German physicians during World War II. In 1949 he published a summary of his testimony in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). He described how the most advanced medical profession in the world was transformed into an appendage of the militarized state, how it lost touch with its mission to care for the sick and infirm. Embracing the politics of the day with patriotic fervor, doctors and other health professionals actively organized a program that was referred to as euthanasia.
In the opening paragraph of his NEJM article, Dr Alexander describes “a rapid decline in standards of professional ethics. Medical science in Nazi Germany collaborated … in the following enterprises: the mass extermination of the chronically sick in the interest of saving ‘useless’ expenses to the community as a whole; [and] the mass extermination of those considered socially disturbing or racially and ideologically unwanted…”
He goes on to describe the system: “The decision regarding which patients should be killed was made entirely on the basis of [limited] information by expert consultants…. These consultants never saw the patients themselves. …[Q]uestionnaires were collected by a ‘Realm’s Work Committee of Institutions for Cure and Care.’ … The ‘Charitable Transport Company for the Sick’ transported patients to the killing centers, and the ‘Charitable Foundation for Institutional Care’ was in charge of collecting the cost of the killings from the relatives, without, however, informing them what the charges were for; in the death certificates the cause of death was falsified.”
When Cook County arranges transportation of undocumented patients to home countries where we know they will not receive the treatments that are keeping them alive, that policy should be referred to as administrative euthanasia. When patients on ventilators are forced to move to nursing homes with none of the resources or expertise needed to care for them properly and a track record of extremely high mortality, that, too, should be labeled administrative euthanasia.
Dr. Alexander concluded, “Whatever proportions these crimes finally assumed, it became evident to all who investigated them that they had started from small beginnings. The beginnings at first were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived.”