A year and a half into the pandemic, the long-feared specter of rationed health care — that is, the delay or denial of medical treatment to some patients who need it because there simply aren’t enough resources to go around — is perilously close to becoming reality. As unvaccinated coronavirus victims overwhelm hospitals, some states are edging toward allowing doctors to decide which patients get immediate care and which don’t. It could affect not just coronavirus patients but medical care across the board.
Frustrated calls to put the willfully unvaccinated at the end of the medical line are understandable, but medical ethics don’t allow that kind of comeuppance. That means some who refuse vaccination (thus contributing to the crisis) could end up getting lifesaving treatment before those who behaved more responsibly but who are deemed less likely to survive. The anti-vaccination holdouts should think hard about whether this is a scenario they’re prepared to live with.
It’s ironic that misguided conservatives are largely the ones driving hospitals toward the rationed-care cliff. These are many of the same folks who falsely alleged a decade ago that the Affordable Care Act would lead to “death panels” and other forms of rationing. That danger was never real, but this time it is.
