Doctors facing grim choice over ventilators told to put patients with disabilities at the back of the line
By Deborah Hellman,
The Conversation
| 04. 20. 2020
In several states, existing policies that were developed in anticipation of an emergency – including pandemics – recommend rationing that prioritizes giving ventilators to otherwise healthy people who are most likely to benefit.
As cases related to the novel coronavirus continue to strain hospitals, doctors face difficult choices about rationing scarce medical resources like ventilators – choices that will likely determine who lives and who dies.
Several states’ policies tell providers to allocate scarce resources to those most likely to benefit. For example, Washington state recently adopted a policy that favors “the survival of young otherwise healthy patients more heavily than that of older, chronically debilitated patients.” Similar new guidelines have been issued in Massachusetts as well.
In several other states, existing policies that were developed in anticipation of an emergency – including pandemics – recommend rationing that prioritizes giving ventilators to otherwise healthy people who are most likely to benefit. The policies may be mandatory in some contexts, depending on state law, but are likely to be influential even when not required.
While seemingly sensible, policies that focus exclusively on saving as many lives as possible may miss something just as important about whose life is spared and whose is not.
As a scholar who studies the law and ethics of discrimination...
Related Articles
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
By Émile P. Torres, Truthdig | 10.17.2025
The Internet philosopher Eliezer Yudkowsky has been predicting the end of the world for decades. In 1996, he confidently declared that the singularity — the moment at which computers become more “intelligent” than humanity — would happen in 2021, though...
By Jay S. Kaufman, Los Angeles Review of Books | 09.27.2025
This is the 10th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...