More testament to austerity.
In Arizona, 98 low-income patients approved for organ transplants have been told they are no longer getting them because of state budget cuts.
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....
[F]acing a $1.5 billion budget deficit, Arizona has cut out all state-funded lung transplants, some bone-marrow transplants and some heart transplants — including transplants for the condition Shepherd has.
"To basically renege on what you promised was [going to] be a chance at life is a very, very bitter indictment of the ethics of the Legislature," says Arthur Caplan, head of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Caplan calls the reversal "awful" behavior because Arizona is going back on a covenant it made with its patients, and because these are patients for whom time is critical — patients who spent months, some years, thinking they were covered.
States like Oregon and Washington have developed health plans that clearly state at the outset what will and will not be covered. They don't make decision mid-stream, yanking people off of waiting lists for life-saving services that have already been authorized. Keeping health care costs down does involve carefully weighing procedures and outcomes and the best investment of dollars. But reneging on the promise of a potential lifesaving treatment is beyond cruel.