Posted by Jack
The 13-year-old California girl who was declared brain dead after a surgery is now in a facility where her family can take care of her, a place her uncle says that believes as much they do that she’s alive.
A critical care team took Jahi McMath while she was attached to a ventilator but without a feeding tube on Sunday night from Children’s Hospital Oakland, after a weekslong battle with the hospital over her care.
Her family wouldn’t disclose where she had been taken. Her uncle, Omari Seeley, said Monday that she traveled by ground and that there were no complications in the transfer, suggesting Jahi may be in California.
The new facility has “been very welcoming with open arms. They have beliefs just like ours,” he said. “They believe as we do.”
While the move ends what had been a very public and tense fight with the hospital, it also brings on new challenge: caring for her.
Jahi went into cardiac arrest while recovering from surgery to fix severe sleep apnea, a condition where the sufferer’s breath stops or becomes labored while sleeping. To help her, surgeons removed her tonsils and other parts of her nose and throat.
Three doctors have declared Jahi brain dead based on exams and tests showing no blood flow or electrical activity in either her cerebrum or the brain stem that controls breathing.
This is different from being in a coma when there is brain activity.
Multiple outside doctors and bioethicists observing the case have said a patient in that condition meets the legal criteria for death and has no chance of recovering.
The hospital had wanted to remove Jahi from the ventilator that is keeping her heart pumping, arguing in court that Jahi’s brain death means she is legally dead.
Her mother, Nailah Winkfield, refusing to believe her daughter is dead as long as her heart is beating, had gone to court to stop the machine from being disconnected.
Nobody has ever recovered from brain death… not ever.
Anyone else wondering who’s paying for her care?
This catastrophe has to be removed from public viewing, right now, so the family can come to terms, which they will in the next few weeks. Talk about your media feeding frenzy.
And I want to have a word with the surgeon on this case. I have a horrible feeling that the girl should have been given a plain vanilla tonsellectomy, kept on the sleep mask and required to lose a few pounds, and then see if a couple years’ growth remediated her condition … but no … somebody had something new they wanted to try.
And then, the family was positively NOT properly informed about risks and complications.
It all reeks of arrogance and incompetence, a catastrophic combination … but what do I know?
And as to who’s paying … we are.
Libby this is one of those rare occasions when you and I absolutely agree. Well said!
I do hate to say it but as to the expense of course “we” pay because “we” live in a communal mindset society instead of a free republic.
If we could remove government from the healthcare business completely things would begin to normalize, prices and costs would come down, and our healthcare would become more affordable for everyone.
Hospitals would discover the value of shopping around for supplies. Suppliers would have to compete more aggressively for the business and the competition would cause innovation and improvements.
Charitable hospitals and special services clinics would spring up like sweet peas in spring. And those who love service and once worked for the government could find real satisfying work in these hospitals.
Would those who build these centers for care be profitable? Yes…because profits, you nutty industry and job killing big government freaks, is what people in management use to pay people in the coming year, to purchase new supplies, to build a new wing, or buy new equipment and sometimes…to subsidies those who haven’t the means to fully pay.
Spending our dollars to pay a bunch of people in Washington or Sacramento to push paper around as middlemen in the process is a big fat waste of resources. The model also contains several deceptions, illusions and lies:
1. Government isn’t paying. Taxpayers are.
2. Government doesn’t pay adequately; they rack up debt! If they taxed us at the rate necessary to pay in full the people wouldn’t be able to afford it and would rebel. (Hello, Obamacare…it has pushed that envelope)
3. Since government run programs don’t pay enough to cover services, those who accept government run health insurance patients are insufficiently compensated for their care. This will get worse as the Boomers retire if nothing is done.
4. After fifty years of government programs the number of uninsured remains high, the poor continue to be inadequately served, the wealthy have subsidies they don’t need, and the services are too expensive for everyone.
5. On top of all this doctors no longer have the financial incentive to make the investment of time, hard, body busting work, or money to become a doctor.
We don’t seem to mind that sports figures and entertainers make incredibly large sums of money (PROFIT) even though the value we receive in supporting them is a bit of fun or pleasure.
Why is it that liberals can’t stand that a hospital makes a profit even though it is a place that provides a much more important and valuable service?
Why do liberals think its okay that people who work in the government healthcare bureaucracy make a profit? They don’t provide the service or deliver the value.
This family would have to consider the cost in a free market republic as part of the tough emotional roller coaster decision making process. They would receive counseling and help; we are a nation that reaches out to those in trouble. But the decision would be private as it should be and would include what they could make possible.
“Government isn’t paying. Taxpayers are.”
What kind of bizarro reasoning is this? This, actually, is a very concise illustration of your “government boogieman” fixation … and what did I say I was going to do EVERY time you aired it?
Try to absorb this, intellectually; it’s important.
Taxpayers ARE the government. They fund and dictate all the goings of said government … in this country, anyway. I know you like to think the your government is some amorphous, many tentacled beast over which you have no control, but this is fantasy. It is also, I believe, an excuse, a really very shabby moral device, whereby you can absolve yourself of responsibility for your government and what it gets up to.
So there.
And the Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California, is a charity hospital. No child brought there is every denied care. And while there probably are a fistful of monied benefactors, it mostly comes down to us, via our government.