Arizona Death Panels: State Revokes Funding for Heart Transplants, Opts to Save Squirrels

Taking heartless insurance cuts to a whole new level, the Arizona legislature has decided to revoke the funding it authorized for nearly 100 transplant patients. Why did the state, after giving these people hope, decide to literally take their lives away? According to NPR, the state looked at the data and determined that transplant patients don’t usually live very long after the transplant so it wasn’t worth the investment. Yes, the same state whose representatives filed a lawsuit challenging the new health care law because it requires people to purchase health insurance has decided to cut the health insurance of heart transplant patients. Maybe if these people had to buy private insurance they wouldn’t have to depend on the whims of a seriously moronic state legislature. From NPR:

The patients receive medical coverage through the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), the state’s version of Medicaid. While it may be common for private insurance companies or government agencies to change eligibility requirements for medical procedures ahead of time, medical ethicists say authorizing a procedure and then reversing that decision is unheard of.

Now something is nagging me about this and the whole idea that a panel of people could get together and decide whose life was worth saving…. Oh, that’s right! I remember the wise sage Sarah Palin saying something like this:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil,” Palin wrote last week.

I guess if you live in Arizona you do have to stand in front of a death panel so the bureaucrats can decide if you’re really deserving of a new heart. I guess they’ve decided that heart transplant patients have already spent enough time living with their wife and 3-year-old son and don’t really need to see that kid graduate from high school. The patient probably won’t make it there anyway, right? No, that’s not evil at all.

What’s even worse is that NPR says Arizona cherry-picked the data they used to show that transplant patients don’t live very long:

The state’s data also show the procedures have poor outcomes and that most patients die after the transplants. But critics say the data was cherry-picked, as it included only patients enrolled in AHCCCS and only for a two-year period.

A coalition of Arizona transplant centers, including well-known programs at the University of Arizona and the Mayo Clinic, recently gave the state data for a broader patient group and a longer time period. It showed much better outcomes.

But, good news, the state will save about $4.5 million this year. Programs they didn’t cut that cost that much? They decided to spend $1.25 Million to “build bridges for endangered squirrels over a mountain road so they don’t become roadkill.” Yes, they are willing to spend more than a million dollars to save five squirrels a year, but not to give someone a new heart. Now that’s a heartless death panel.

You can listen to NPR’s story here: