Grady Hospital, the public hospital here in Atlanta GA that provides care for the indigent sick, has been having financial troubles in recent years with multimillion deficits. Now based on the recommendations of an outside consulting firm they have proposed saving money by denying dialysis treatments to Non-citizens. For those who are not familiar with it, dialysis is a procedure performed two or three times a week in patients with kidney failure which uses a machine to remove toxins from the body that are normally removed by the kidneys. Taking away dialysis is a death sentence. The brilliant plan of Grady includes giving people plane tickets to Connecticut or back to their home countries, or letting them go to the Emergency Room if and when they start dying.

This is so obviously an unethical procedure that it makes you wonder how anyone who calls him/herself a member of the medical profession can go along with this. It obviously is a violation of the Hippocratic oath which states that doctors should not do harm. Come to think about it, our entire medical system, which has people making a profit from people’s sickness, along with everything that goes along with that, like riscission (insurance companies dropping people after they develop a chronic illness), churning tests and procedures that do not benefit patients health, and now making non-citizens walk the plank in the name of saving money, is a violation of the Hippocratic oath. I think a system that incentivizes medical personnel to undercut health is immoral.