Report: Doctors killed patients in New Orleans

[pegkerr]

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals.

Is this a reputable news source? Has anyone read anything about this in U.S./other authoritative coverage?

Because I gotta believe, if this is true, that this is going to be a big deal for the "compassionate conservative" pro-life right wing, the ones who rode into town to make Terri Schiavo's last days such a circus.

This is huge. This has got to shock even Bush supporters. Unless the Bushwackers find some way to pin this on the liberals (perhaps they'll try to spin it that the doctor was one of those cowardly left wing "culture-of-death" types? Or spin it that if the doctor had believed in the right to bear arms like a true red-blooded American should, she would have stayed at the hospital to defend her patients at gunpoint, instead of fleeing to save her own "cowardly" neck?)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I read or heard someplace (and now i don't remember where except that it was somewhere that sounded to me like a reliable single-witness account) that medical staff at one hospital was DEBATING the question of whether dying patients that could not be evacuated should be euthanized if and when the staff had to be evacuated and patients left behind. I do not know the outcome of that discussion for some reason. Possibly it was reported by somebody who was still on the scene in a hospital. The report I heard may have been the origin of the Mail story, just twisted a little to make it more sensational.

If there were hospitals where staff was evacuated but patients left behind, this question had to have come up. But did that actually happen at any hospital? There were clearly patients that died due to deterioriating conditions while waiting to be evacuated, but as far as I know, at least some staff stayed behind in all the hospitals until the patients were evacuated.

The line about staff "fleeing the hospital for fear of armed looters" is almost certainly false. The hospitals were not full of looters. They were locked down from the outside, and in some cases surrounded by water. Patients had to be evacuated from one large hospital through a hole chopped in the roof of an attached parking ramp because the street was underwater. Hospitals were evacuated because they had no power, working plumbing or air-conditioning, not because of looters.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I still don't remember where I encountered that story about the euthanasia discussion in a hospital, but I didn't intend to post it anonymously. I thought i was logged in.

Having read the comments above that describe the Daily Mail as a right-wing paper, I went back and read the story again. The tone sounds as if they are trying to send a politicized message of some sort, but what??