HB1094
HB1094 is the House' identical version of the Senate Bill SB439. You can read the text of the bill by clicking here.
HB1094 makes a single change to the futile care law: If patients do not agree to have their life support stopped, hospitals must continue life sustaining treatment until the patient is transferred to another hospital. In other words, hospitals won't be able to override patients' rights and kill them against their will. That's it. Nothing slick about it--just stop killing patients who choose to continue fighting. No heroic measures or pioneering treatments or extraordinary procedures are required, just basically, don't starve, dehydrate, suffocate, or poison to death the patients who don't want to be killed.
The very one-sided hearing for the bill was April 25, 2007. Click here for highlights of the hearing. See the video of the hearing by clicking here.
The House Public Health committee is chaired by Diane "White" Delisi
("White" as in Scott & White Clinics--hardly an unbiased
representative of the people, wouldn't you say?) She is opposing HB1094 and
has her own bill (HB3474) that on the surface sounds slightly better, but
in fact is much worse for patients. Her bill extends the 10 day waiting
period to 21 days (frankly any time period is equivalent to a death sentence
to the patient because when a time period is applied, hospitals have
no incentive to get a patient transferred and in fact, typically do everything
they can to prevent transfers from occurring. Basically, once the futile
care process is started, patient rights STOP. Period.) But what really makes
the bill worse than the current one is that during the 21 day period, if
the patient's condition changes, for example, if the patient gets pneumonia
during that time, the hospital isn't required to administer antibiotics or
to treat the pneumonia even in a basic way, but is only required to continue
the treatment that was in effect at the beginning of the 21 days. Obviously,
the patient's chance for finding a transfer becomes even slimmer when
his condition is allowed to worsen due to lack of basic medical treatment.
Representative Delisi, with her ties to the Scott & White machine has a lot
of pressure from corporate medicine. Our job is to put pressure on her
from the people she swore to represent.
So everyone who lives in District 55, Representative Delisi's district,
get on the phone to her office (512) 463-0630 or
(512) 463-0937 Fax and let her
know you want her to support HB1094 and NOT to support her own dangerous
bill, HB3474. You can also email her by clicking
here. And please do it NOW! We are almost out of time!
Even if you don't live in Delisi's district, you can let your own representative
know that you want them to encourage Delisi and other members of the House Public
Health Committee to vote for "treatment pending transfer" as outlined
in HB1094 rather than Delisi's bill. Again, please do it NOW! We are almost
out of time!