McCaughey vs. Reality: Battle Emanuel

In typical fashion, McCaughey has read a piece of text and published her opinion of what it says.  Her opinion, furthermore, is framed as though it were fact - even though it is not a researched, unbiased, or in any way reliable conclusion.

In this case, McCaughey attacks Dr. Emanuel for academic articles he has written over the years that address the myriad of issues faced by bioethicists.  She is very clearly unfamiliar with the concept of an academic article on ethics.  Most people familiar with reading studies of ethical issues are aware of the delicate nature of interpreting the work:

Pointing out what a certain view might entail is an important part of what ethicists do. Which means that you have to read ethics papers carefully in order to determine when you're seeing someone's actual position and when you're seeing that person articulate some possible conclusions.

And if this is true for ethics in general, it's especially true for bioethics, where the subject matter inevitably involves extremely sensitive issues that are, literally, about life and death.

That doesn't stop McCaughey.  She boldly goes where no rational person has gone before and takes snippets of old research papers and decides that those ethical, philosophical musings reflect the policy suggestions Dr. Emanuel could be making to the White House.

When McCaughey originally trotted out this argument ten days ago, FactCheck.org was all over her.  According to the (independent, nonpartisan) folks over there:

McCaughey cites an article Emanuel wrote nearly 15 years ago in the Hastings Center Report, a journal devoted to discussion of ethical issues in medicine. There Emanuel discusses possible philosophical justifications to "distinguish basic from discretionary health care services." Emanuel argued that thinkers on both the left and right were beginning to converge on a single answer when it comes to allocating medical resources...

Emanuel conceded that the article is "pretty abstract" and may be difficult to follow for those who are not academics, but he said that one should not then "take two sentences out of context."

"This is clearly not written in my own voice," he said. "I am not advocating this."

We'll leave it to you to determine the merits of Emanuel's philosophical observations. But the context makes it clear that Emanuel is describing the implications of a particular philosophical trend, not offering a policy prescription.

In both the New York Post and Wall Street Journal articles, McCaughey cites a January 31, 2009 Lancet article co-authored by Dr. Emanuel in which he discussed the issues confronted by a bioethicist.  Dr. Emanuel's article explores the ethical problem when faced, for example, with one healthy kidney and three possible recipients.  In the hypothetical analysis, the authors discuss the various criteria physicians would be faced with in determining which patient should receive the kidney.

Regarding the Lancet piece, FactCheck.org clarified:

What Emanuel and his two coauthors were actually writing about was how to decide which patients are to receive organ transplants, vaccines or other "very scarce medical interventions" when there are not enough to go around. The three authors advocated favoring younger patients over older patients as part of a "complete lives" decision-making system aimed at saving the most years of life using the available resources. Age would be only one factor, however. Also weighing in the "complete lives" system would be such factors as a patient's likelihood of full recovery (prognosis) and the use of a lottery when deciding between two "roughly equal" patients.

...The authors stated that the complete lives system "empowers us to decide fairly whom to save when genuine scarcity makes saving everyone impossible."

Based on the objective analysis above, it is clear that the youngest patient would not necessarily win out over an older patient.  In fact, if the oldest patient had the greatest chance of recovery then they could very well receive the treatment in question.

So the purpose of bioethicists is to take a health care scenario and go down the allegorical "slippery slope" to a natural conclusion.  Isn't this helpful?  Isn't it helpful to address these issues in an academic setting where no lives are at stake? 

These two imaginative pieces by McCaughey are incredibly similar, down to the conclusions that both call Dr. Emanuel's "arm-twisting Chicago style" tactics to get health care reform passed.  It's unclear whether she feels so strongly about lambasting a widely respected doctor that she'll repeat herself, was unhappy with the coverage the first one received, or just wanted to see her name in print again and lazily sort of reworked an existing article.

Betsy McCaughey is willfully deceiving the American public.  Period.  And anyone who repeats her interpretations of reality is also knowingly misleading people.  Americans deserve better.