This was cold comfort for the Gulf War veteran as law enforcement evicted him from the hospital. However, it is the logical conclusion of defining hospital treatment as acute care only. By definition, the tertiary care hospital could not give him the help he needed. The veteran's story was a small news item in our local media, and I waited in vain for medical ethics to make some comment about this case. Medical ethics shirks such ethical commentary, because it has been an important part of justifying the creation of such medical systems to begin with.
Reform is always a beautiful word on the lips of the reformer.
Worse, medical ethics seems to feel it is not ethics if someone looks at the economic agendas and systems and makes a moral evaluation. It does this in a number of clever ways. The first is benign neglect, to use an old phrase of Sen. Patrick Moynihan. The huge utilitarian ethics apparatus of modern medical ethics is put off limits for any analysis or criticism. This places most of the real ethical problems in current medicine off limits.