UCLA Challenges The Death Panelists

The picture you're seeing is the main entrance to the newly-upgraded UCLA Medical Center. As a UC Berkely alum, I teased my son unmercifully for graduating from our junior cousin to the south. But it was always good-natured ribbing. Both have excellent medical schools, but UCLA's is better-known, and has just recently been rated one of the top three hospitals in the nation.

Of course, I've also made a few cracks about its cross-town rival which is attached to USC. Now UCLA is a public university, and USC is a private university, but everything's a little strange in California. The proudest part of the UC center in L.A. is that it is known as the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Its much less prestigious rival became part of the Los Angeles County USC Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Center. The County Medical Center was once an architectural wonder and a decent medical facility. As it grew older, it felt it needed both the attachment to a major university (USC) and identification with the demographic it served (Central and South Central Los Angeles). While UCLA's prestige increased every year, the County Center became a place reminiscent of the horror stories of medical practice in 19th century England.

By 2005, the care became so dangerous at the Martin Luther King Trauma Center, that it was de-certified, and ultimately closed. Four accidental patient deaths from negligent doctors and nurses in one day merely capped nearly ten years of declining and ever more incompetent treatment at the Center. Recently, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center was re-opened in a different part of town, but the County/USC Center has shown very few signs of improvement. Public university with ever-increasing accolades, versus private university with an unenviable record. So we can't always assume that public is necessarily bad, or that private is automatically better. The difference here is that the doctors and medical experts run the UCLA Medical Center, and County bureaucrats, politicians and university administrators run the County/USC Medical Center. I will admit that it's a rather unusual reversal of roles.

As interesting as that contrast may be, that is not the real purpose of this article. The real purpose is to point out that in keeping with its high reputation, UCLA has led the way in a particular area of health care of extreme interest to the majority of Americans who are watching the potential crippling of health care and death of elderly patients being jammed down their throats by the Obama administration. UCLA has published a "UCLA Medical Center at the Heart of End-of-Life Debates" series which was capped on December 23 with a front page piece largely opposing and attacking the federal government's analysis of how to ration health care, particularly for the elderly and critically ill. The study and conclusions were joined by four other western university medical schools, including UCSF.

UCLA has long had the reputation of staffing doctors who will go to any length to save a life. "If you come into this hospital, we're not going to let you die," according to Dr. David T. Feinberg, the Center's chief executive (a doctor as the executive deciding on life and death--who'd a thunk it?). The government plan (as best we can tell amidst all the confusion) decides on two factors: "Is this life capable of being saved?" and "Does the patient fit into a category which allows for extraordinary life-saving techniques?" (old folks need not apply, and money is an object).

UCLA decides on the basis of "Is the patient still alive, and is there any way known to medical science to save him?" The Obama administration and a recent Dartmouth study gives UCLA minus points for "spending the most on end-of-life care" with what they claim produces no discernible difference in the end results." The obvious question is "how do they know that?" The UCLA doctors are not spendthrifts, although their facilities couldn't be more state-of-the-art, but they say that "they recognize a difficult truth: It can be hard, sometimes impossible, to know which critically ill patients will benefit and which will not."

The Dartmouth Study considers only the costs of treating patients who have ultimately died after the life-saving treatment, but ignores the ones who survive. So their conclusion as to "no difference in results" is meaningless. But it's a government bureaucrat's dream. "Hmm, old, chronic life-endangering illness, most likely treatment too expensive. REJECT."

Good doctors consider all the factors, including alternate (and frequently less expensive) treatments. UCLA does exactly that. They cite the example (their study shows it's a typical example, not merely anecdotal) of one Salah Putrus, age 71. He was referred to UCLA for a heart transplant after at least two other hospitals and several doctors had given up any hope of his surviving the surgery, or surviving it for any appreciable period of time. The doctors at UCLA reviewed his medical history carefully, and used all those "expensive" machines that can test just about anything, and concluded the heart surgery was not only dangerous for a man in his condition, but unnecessary as well. They put him on a drug regimen to reduce the amount of water he was retaining. They removed some teeth that were potential sources of infection. Mr. Putrus has been out of the UCLA Med Center for over six months now, his health has improved exponentially, and he is no longer considered in active need of a transplant.

Rhetorical question: Which would have been more expensive--a heart transplant that would likely have killed the patient or left him with a very short life expectancy, or the use of doctors and state-of-the-art equipment which determined that the transplant wasn't even necessary. And add to that, that heart can only be used once. The doctors and the equipment can be utilized over, and over, and over.

The Los Angeles Times, a big fan of Obamacare, nevertheless picked up on the findings of the UCLA series, and concluded that in the case of heart failure patients, "the hospitals that spend the most seem to save the most lives." An obvious fact entirely missed by Obamacare and the sycophantic Dartmouth study. For those who believe that health care is a matter of mere numbers and statistics, I suggest that if they are older or suffering from a chronic life-endangering illness, they should consider being treated at UCLA Medical Center rather than at Dartmouth.