And Now Who Pays the Bill?

I wrote several days ago about this tragic situation of Erick Muñoz being forced by the officials at John Peter Smith Hospital to permit them to perform what was essentially a bizarre medical experiment on the body of his deceased wife. Because she was 14 weeks pregnant at the time she was officially declared brain dead (i.e., all life functions ceased), but was in the hospital when that happened, hospital personnel insisted they had to artificially keep her body functions intact enough until they could deliver the fetus (at the earliest around 22 weeks.)

I do believe some people had a sleeping beauty image of a woman floating blissfully in an un-waking dreamland while the baby grew comfortably in her womb. But Marlise Muñoz was dead. Her heart was beating, but every other function had to be artificially supported in some way. That meant, among other things, massive amounts of various supportive drugs, including antibiotics to fight the hospital acquired infections, and tubes running from every natural orifice in her body and several human-made ones.

There is no peaceful sleep here. This was a dead woman being forced to act as an incubator for a fetus that had already been deprived of oxygen for an extended period of time and now was slowly being destroyed as the mother’s body began to undergo inevitable deterioration.

Thankfully, the court ruled on Friday that the hospital administrators had made an incorrect call in their insistence on staying their course. Life support has been disconnected and the body released to the family.

In my previous article I wrote,

“And speaking of paying for this, I assume, this family is, against their wishes, being billed for every molecule of oxygen pumped into those dead lungs and every latex glove that touches the tubes filling and draining this poor woman’s body. The husband will be in impossible debt for the rest of his life, with his insurance long since maxed-out, by the decisions of those who are acting in direct opposition to their wishes. He will probably be hounded to pay those bills by the same attorneys who are saying,”Sorry. Can’t help you.”

And now the New York Times has reported this:

It was unclear on Sunday who would end up paying the hospital bill. Hospital officials had said previously that they were focused on caring for Ms. Muñoz, and that it was inappropriate for them to comment on or estimate the cost of a patient’s care. “At the appropriate time, the finance department will pursue the customary avenues to identify payers and reimbursement,” Ms. Labbe said.

How much do you want to be that this grieving husband and father gets stuck with a bill that will destroy him financially? This is the state of our medical system: they can do whatever they want and you get to pay. There is a much larger tragedy being played out here. I hope this will wake people up a bit.