The bullshit Obamacare "death panels" have been replaced by real, Republican death panels in several states ($$):
There was one bed coming available in the intensive care unit in Alaska’s largest hospital.
It was the middle of the night, and the hospital, Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, had been hit with a deluge of coronavirus patients. Doctors now had a choice to make: Several more patients at the hospital, most of them with Covid-19, were in line to take that last I.C.U. spot. But there was also someone from one of the state’s isolated rural communities who needed to be flown in for emergency surgery.
Who should get the final bed?
Dr. Steven Floerchinger gathered with his colleagues for an agonizing discussion. They had a better chance of saving one of the patients in the emergency room, they determined. The other person would have to wait.
That patient died.
“This is gut-wrenching, and I never thought I’d see it,” said Dr. Floerchinger, who has been in practice for 30 years. “We are taxed to a point of making decisions of who will and who will not live.”
Other Republican- run states have been in the same situation, thanks to their sociopathic political leaders following cues from the malignant loser and his media enablers:
The states with the worst outbreaks in confirmed cases per capita right now — Tennessee, Kentucky, Alaska, Wyoming, and West Virginia, according to the New York Times’s tracker — have either set new hospitalization records in the last several weeks or are near their previous highs from the winter wave. All of them have vaccination rates below the national average. Throughout the South, hospitals are reporting they have more patients in need of ICU care than ICU beds available, as the Times reported on Tuesday.
America, the richest country in the world, is not supposed to be a place where patients are left at the door to die. Yet that is exactly what’s happening now — 18 months into the pandemic. [snip]
In Bellville, Texas, 46-year-old military veteran Daniel Wilkinson was rushed to the emergency room. He was diagnosed with gallstone pancreatitis, which is treatable but which his local hospital was not equipped to treat, according to KPRC. The doctor called all over the region — to hospitals in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, among others — but could not find a hospital that would take him. Those states currently have some of the highest Covid-19 hospitalization rates in the country.
An ICU bed was eventually located at a Houston Veterans Administration hospital, more than an hour away from Bellville. But Wilkinson’s organs started failing on the helicopter ride there and he died. It had been more than seven hours since his mother first brought him to the local ER.
All of which could have been avoided if the spineless Republican politicians in these states and nationally were more concerned about the health and well- being of their base than they were about appeasing their sub- moronic party leader and, thus, maintain their power.
It's being reported that COVID cases and hospitalizations are finally dropping, due to increased vaccination rates (including vaccine mandates by major employers) and continued mitigation efforts like mask wearing and social distancing. We may get out of this deadly cycle, no thanks to the un- vaccinated -- the paranoid, the loons, the lib- owners, etc., and those who've led them to the Republican death panels.
