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Utah Case Highlights Need for Separation of Medicine and Law Enforcement

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In July, Salt Lake City detective Jeff Payne violently abducted Alex Wubbels, a nurse at University of Utah Hospital. Most accounts don’t put it that way — they use the word “arrested” instead — but Wubbels was released without charges because Payne’s actions were clearly an extralegal physical power play by a police officer who was angry at not getting his way.

At issue: Payne wanted to draw blood from a patient who’d been involved in a traffic accident, presumably to test that blood for drugs and alcohol. The patient was not under arrest. He was unconscious and couldn’t consent. And Payne didn’t have a warrant. So Wubbels, in accordance with hospital policy, refused to let him molest her patient.

Since the incident, the hospital has revised its procedures to protect members of its staff. Law enforcement personnel are no longer allowed into patient care areas where they might bully doctors and nurses. They’re required to check in at the front desk and deal directly with supervisors instead.

That’s a good start, but it’s only a start. Instead of merely changing the way they assist police, hospitals should make it clear that assisting police isn’t their job.

Around the country, police have long conscripted medical professionals as investigative assistants, demanding not just blood draws but forced catheterizations,  enemas, and colonoscopies.

The purpose of a hospital is to treat the sick and injured, not to act as an arm of law enforcement. If police bring in patients to treat, of course conscientious doctors and nurses will treat those patients.

But medical professionals have an ethical obligation “to abstain from doing harm.”  A medically unnecessary procedure exposes the patient to potential harm, as all such procedures come with risks. Furthermore, when a hospital develops a reputation for acting as an adjunct to law enforcement, that reputation will likely scare patients with potential legal entanglements into forgoing treatment, likely resulting in harm.

Hospitals should, as a matter of strict policy, refuse to perform unnecessary procedures for police evidence collection purposes, or to allow police to perform those procedures on their premises. And if, after the fact, a law enforcement agency wants access to patient specimens or patient information gathered  for legitimate medical purposes, those things should be turned over only in response to a valid search warrant, issued on probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and signed off on by a judge.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Preparedness versus “Price-Gouging”: Don’t Hold Out for a Hero

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Hurricane Harvey
Harvey as a hurricane, 08/24/17. NASA Goddard Space Center — public domain

As the US Gulf Coast continues to reel under the impact of Hurricane Harvey, the word “hero” finds itself in much, and appropriate, use. From government first responders to Louisiana’s “Cajun Navy” to just plain old friends and neighbors, people are pitching in and helping one another through the worst tropical storm to make landfall in the US in more than a decade. That’s a ray of sunshine for a cloudy week.

But, living as I do in another hurricane-prone area (Florida) where I got a small taste of the phenomenon from Hermine last year, and having seen my share of tornadoes, blizzards, floods, earthquakes, etc. in other places, it seems to me that hoping for such heroics should be the last rather than the first resort.

No, I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to be, or should be, an all-out “prepper.” Maybe you can afford your own generator, maybe you can’t. Maybe you can afford a boat or a four-wheel-drive vehicle with a winch or snow blade to pitch in with, maybe you can’t. You may or may not be inclined to keep ten years’ worth of freeze-dried food in the spare bedroom.

But most people can  afford to take some simple measures to prepare for emergencies both predictable and sudden.

First, always keep several days’ worth of bottled drinking water on hand. It goes for a few dollars a case … until there’s a run on it because of an impending storm or sudden tap water outage.

Secondly, set aside additional jugs or buckets of water, or keep a rain barrel, so you don’t cut into your drinking supply to keep toilets flushing and for personal hygiene.

And food. Don’t forget food: A few days’ worth of meals that don’t require refrigeration and that you either can eat cold or have a way to cook if the power goes out.

Flashlights, radio, power packs for your phones, batteries for all of the above. Make sure you’re not short on any vital medications, in case you can’t reach an open pharmacy. I’m sure you can think of a few other things.

Unlike some libertarians, I’m not going to try to convince you that merchants who charge greatly increased prices during times of emergency are “heroes” as such. On the other hand, it’s neither realistic nor especially moral to expect a business owner  to provide the goods you need — risking his or her own wealth or even life to do so — for any less than the market will bear.

There’s an old saying: You can’t cheat an honest man.

Here’s a new one: You can’t “price-gouge” a customer who thinks ahead.

Be your own hero, so someone else doesn’t have to.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Hurricane Harvey: About That Wall …

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Hurricane Harvey
Harvey as a hurricane, 08/24/17. NASA Goddard Space Center — public domain

As I write this, Hurricane Harvey hovers off the Gulf Coast, menacing Louisiana and possibly ramping up for another go at Texas. Much of Houston, the fourth largest city in the United States, is under water.

It may be weeks before the storms end, the waters recede, and basic utilities are restored. But this, too, shall pass — and then begins the rebuilding. Who’s going to do that rebuilding?

A few years back, a contractor who built houses in Louisiana and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 answered that question for me. Demand for construction workers was high, but many American workers weren’t especially interested in spending months away from home, living in trailers or tents. And those who were willing to take jobs that didn’t have them home every night understandably commanded premium pay.

If not for large numbers of largely “undocumented” workers who showed up ready to work for reasonable wages, the contractor told me, the work simply couldn’t have been completed in any reasonable time-frame or at any reasonable cost.

Even before Harvey, an April 2017 poll by Texas Lyceum found that 62% of Texans believe immigration helps the US more than it hurts, and that 61% of Texans oppose US president Donald Trump’s “border wall” project.

Hopefully those numbers will go up as the bills for Hurricane Harvey start to arrive and the need for (re)construction labor begins to mount.

Hopefully, President Trump will re-think both his border wall proposal and his emphasis on immigration enforcement, and order at least a temporary draw-down of Border Patrol and Immigration & Customs Enforcement operations, especially along the Gulf Coast.

The conflict Donald Trump faces now is one of priorities. He can indulge his immigration obsession or he can let the market rebuild Houston. He can’t do both.

To put it bluntly, America can’t afford to live without Houston and the rest of Gulf Coast Texas for even a moment more than absolutely necessary. If the Houston metro area was a country, its GDP would rank 28th in the world. It routinely ranks near the top of US job creation and paycheck indices.  Even setting raw human suffering aside — and we shouldn’t — the rest of America will feel each day without Houston in our pocketbooks (possibly to the point of recession).

Impeding immigration has always been morally evil and economically stupid. In the wake of Harvey, it will remain morally evil and become economically suicidal.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY