This is from Kenneth Alan Totz, DO, JD, FACEP (reprinted with permission):
As an attorney and emergency physician practicing in Arizona, Texas, and Colorado, your bottom-line prediction is correct. It is not within our DNA to ration healthcare. Our medical community is extremely resourceful and generous sharing resources within the state and across state lines. If the patient reasonably needs something, we find a way to get it for them. On my last shift this week, I transferred a patient hundreds of miles away via fixed wing aircraft to get the ICU resources they needed. Our hospital had run out of remdesivir as well. This was an intubated 67 year old hispanic gentlemen with COVID with a history of diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and a prior coronary by-pass surgery. The discussion of this patient's comorbidities was never raised when deciding to push forward with advanced medical care. The states can enact rationing of resource protocols, but the physicians are not necessarily going to adhere to them. Just like the minority patients have a distrust of the healthcare system, the medical community has a general distrust that they will NOT be legally protected if these rationing algorithms need to be instituted.
