Purdue University
English Composition II – Eng 105
Fall 1988, Dr. Bolduc
Grade: (A)
Technological Solutions
Modern medical technology saves lives. Technology is here, but solutions to the social problems it creates are still unsolved. These social problems are legal, ethical, financial, and maintenance in nature.
If you’re not a medical person you may be amazed to know what some of the technology can do. If your lungs don’t work air can be forced into them with respirators; they can be adjusted to keep oxygen and carbon dioxide levels perfectly balanced. Nonfunctioning hearts can be maintained in many ways: drugs can make it contract stronger, beat slower or faster, and open or close blood vessels leading to the heart. Pumps can be used to do the heart’s pumping job for it and let it rest. There are plastic total replacement hearts now in use. If you are too sick to eat, nourishment can be totally supplied and balanced by infusing it through your veins or infusing it through a tube in your stomach. No kidneys – no problem, we have machines that can filter your blood. If you combine the different types of technology (which happens frequently) you can keep a person with “total body failure” alive for indeterminant periods of time; goody goody.
In the United States, all men are created equal so all men should have equal access to this wondrous lifesaving technology. All living wills (written requests not to receive heroic life support if terminally ill) should be banned. Anyone who would write such a request must be considered “off” mentally anyway because who would not want their life saved?
This would simplify things for all involved. No family would be asked to make judgments about whether to put their 97-year-old grandmother on a respirator; no parent would have to decide whether to feed their infant born without a cranium (the bone that covers the brain). What a comfort it will be to relieve loved ones of these tortuous decisions. Healthcare professionals won’t have to make decisions about whether to use or how much technology to use on a particular patient; they will simply use all available technology on every patient.
Now that we have solved the legal and ethical problems we can deal with the financial aspects. Many hospitals are going bankrupt due to cuts in Medicare\Medicaid reimbursements; the government surely won’t pay for increased use of technology for the aged and poor. The patient and family are the ones benefiting from the technology so they must pay for it. They need to become open-minded in regard to fundraising schemes; cocaine sales are quite profitable and at least would be for a good cause. The United States Defense Department is known for having an unlimited and inflated budget; loans could surely be obtained directly from them; patients could bid for loans and the defense department could decide who is the worthiest.
There is a nationwide nursing shortage so they can’t take care of these patients. Closed boarded-up steel mills and other bankrupt factories could be turned into warehouses for the “almost dead” people being kept alive. Men out of work from these factories could be trained as maintenance men for the life support systems. “Really dead people” (like decapitation victims) could be used to provide replacement parts for the “almost dead”. We could call it Human Recycling.
No one can now say that we have technology without equitable means to deal with its results.
GOOD!