Well, no, the article doesn't address any of those issues. In the case of the teenager apparently allowed to die through refusal-of-service, the logic of the situation as presented by the hospital—either the child dies, or others die—is not interrogated with regard to possible alternatives. Vastly increasing ICU capacity nation-wide in a single year might be tough (although I don't agree with your framing of its impossibility) but why could it not be done in this particular, local case? It seems obvious that hospitals have a strong incentives to present cost-minimization as "profound ethical dilemmas."The future work briefly touched on at the end—focusing on organ transplants and miniaturization, and framed by a professional arguing that "the overarching problem here is that we have this fear of letting people die"—does not cover any of the obvious but difficult ways of dealing with individual situations in the near-to-medium term (bottlenecks in production, personnel, etc.).
No comments yet.