Trump Death Panels Come to Utah

Old people will be denied hospital care so they can treat the young instead.

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The toll the coronavirus has already taken on healthcare workers is tragic. From the first days of the pandemic, Trump has failed to deliver the PPE nurses and doctors still need. He has pushed for re-openings without a second thought about the physical and mental health effects on essential workers who have already pushed to the limit and beyond.

We’ve seen it across the country. Now we’re seeing it in Utah:

When University of Utah Hospital opened an overflow ICU two weeks ago, hospital officials warned that it would be staffed by doctors and nurses working overtime — at a time when health care workers already routinely break down into tears describing hospital conditions during the pandemic.

We’ve also seen the arrival of “rationed healthcare.” Or what Sarah Palin taught us to call “Death Panels” and called “downright evil.”

Rationed healthcare “should terrify you.”

In June, Michael Hiltzik wrote in the Los Angeles Times about the arrival of rationed healthcare in Arizona and other states:

In practical terms, that means that on average, older adults are more likely to be denied care than younger persons. Those with medical conditions other than COVID-19 would be more vulnerable to denials than  those judged to be healthier, whatever their age.

He also explained how the arrival of rationed care represented not just a complete failure of leadership from the President on down—but also a willingness to lie to the American people about what was going on around them:

From the federal government down through the states, the vacuum of  leadership has exposed millions of Americans to sickness and death while reducing our healthcare system to a patchwork of overwhelmed  facilities…. President Trump and Republican governors such as Arizona’s Doug Ducey and Florida’s Ron DeSantis have suppressed statistics showing the true rate of infection in their states. Trump’s approach to the crisis has been focused in large part in trying to minimize its impact, even denying its existence.

When I wrote about the arrival of Trump Death Panels in Texas in July, I said:  “We can’t say we didn’t see this coming. We already had reports from Italy in March of medical professionals ‘weeping in the hospital hallways because of the choices they are going to have to make.’”

Now it’s October. And it’s happening in Utah.

While Trump keeps insisting, “we are rounding the turn” on COVID-19, as the conservative-leaning New Hampshire Union Leader wrote in its endorsement of Joe Biden: “the corner we turned is down a dark alley of record infections and deaths.”

In Utah, they’ve turned down that alley, too. As the Salt-Lake Tribune writes, at a time when “the coronavirus has left Utah’s hospitals desperately understaffed”:

In the event that two patients’ conditions are equal, the young get priority over the old, since older patients are more likely to die.

The situation is exacerbated not just by burnout among doctors and nurses, but by the fact they are needed to care for their own loved ones outside the hospital.

As Greg Bell, president of the Utah Hospital Association, puts it:

“We’re down 20% to 30%. Hundreds and hundreds of nurses are not able to work as they were [before] because of their own disease or infection in the family, or they’re moms and dads with school issues. Some are worn out, some are on leave because they’ve been doing this for seven months.”

Of course, if we had a President who didn’t promote only miracle cures and bleach injections, we could have used the cheap, effective way to stop the spread like they did in other countries.

In mask-wearing Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, only 1,711 people have died of COVID-19. In South Korea, total deaths are just 457.

Meanwhile, in Trump’s Macho-QAnon-Land-of-Fuck-Your-Feelings-Guns-and-Freedom-USA, just since Friday we’ve had more deaths than Japan has had in the entire pandemic.

On Saturday, Vice President and Head of the Coronavirus Task Force Mike Pence announced as many new cases—five—in his own inner circle as they reported in all of Hong Kong.

And Death Panels have come to Utah.

We can’t say we didn’t see this coming.

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