FORCES International Editorial

EDITORIAL

FUTURE FORWARD - MEDICAL CARE AS A PRIVILEGE OF THE OBEDIENT AND VIRTUOUS

February 11, 2001 - "Smokers' rights - c'mon, isn't that kind of a trivial sort of issue in the great scheme of things?" That's a question that we get from time to time, but FORCES has always had a profound understanding of the dangers to a liberal society that are posed by entities that seek the collective goal of a "better, more efficient and productive society for all" by means of controlling the behaviour of individuals, and using fear and coercion to enforce conformity. Those potential dangers are becoming present reality.

Australian surgeons are now refusing potentially life-saving surgery to smokers and others who have indulged in "substance abuse" on "medical and moral grounds". Medical grounds… hmmm. Why not refuse treatment to patients with usually lethal forms of cancer on the grounds that most of them will die anyway? The Australian surgeons' "medical grounds" provide a new way of "controlling health care costs" that could, if expanded, provide significant insurance savings for healthy, well-behaved people who know that they will never get ill. Moral grounds? Well, the sky's the limit there. We say the Australian surgeons should not be permitted to become high priests mandated to issue moral imperatives like theocratic law-givers. We say their failure to fulfill their professional and moral obligations is criminal. They are acting like judges and executioners, exercising a power that is not legitimately theirs.

Using the same rationale, it will be possible in the future - unless these people are stopped - to refuse medical treatment to whole classes of people based on "medical and moral grounds". Perhaps Australia should consider a High Commission for Medical Eligibility to examine the "purity" of people's lives before those people are allowed the privilege of being admitted to hospital.

One should not be encouraged at all by those voices from the white-coated establishment that seem to be speaking out against the abuses. In connection with a report that the first Australian smoker had died after being refused treatment, a spokesman for the Australian Medical Association, Dr. Michael Sedgely, said it was "unconscionable" for doctors to refuse treatment based on moral evaluation of patients. But the AMA endorses the surgeons' witholding of treatment nonetheless. The AMA wants to forward this movement towards excluding some people from the medical system, while appearing to be alarmed -- a baldly two-faced and morally reprehensible position. Don't hold your breath waiting for any doctors to be disciplined or removed from the profession for refusing to operate on smokers, the obese, drug users, or -- if the trend continues -- weekend athletes who could have avoided injury by staying at home. The medical system, like heaven, is set to become a reward for the virtuous.

Another word for it is torture

The Australian smoker who died - whether or not he would have died anyway, with or without surgery, is beside the point - was victim of a peculiar cat and mouse game over the last couple of months. He was initially refused an operation because he was a smoker. Two months later the surgery was finally performed for reasons as yet unexplained in the press as we write this (fear of legal action, perhaps?). In the meantime, one can only imagine the man's feeling of powerlessness, and his full understanding of his relationship with the people who held power over him.

If you hold a gun to someone's head, it is psychological terror - a form of torture. The man in question, who had refused to give up smoking, had his surgery cancelled in December literally at the last minute. He was shaved and ready to be wheeled into the operating theatre when the moral condemnation and refusal of help was handed down from on high. But wait - the doctors, perhaps worried about personal liability issues (certainly they weren't worried about the patient), didn't have the nerve to go through with their threats all the way. They just delayed surgery - until it was too late - achieving their aim of striking terror into smoking patients while perhaps giving them a leg to stand on should the case ever come before a court of law.

Psychological torture of the sort that this man suffered is a disgrace in a civilised nation. Smokers, are you ready to fight? If it is true, as one of these Australian reports suggests, that surgery bans have already been imposed on fat people and that sports injury bans could be next, fat people, are you ready to fight? Skiiers, are you ready to fight? Friends and neighbors - it's time to put an end to this, so that you can tell your grandchildren you helped to stop it.

Olivia Anne MacDiarmid