Monday September 19, 2005

If you read this article and still think that our government isn’t too bureaucratic, cumbersome, and invasive … then I give up. Here’s most of it:

“In the midst of administering chest compressions to a dying woman several days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dr. Mark N. Perlmutter was ordered to stop by a federal official because he wasn’t registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

‘I begged him to let me continue,’ said Perlmutter, who left his home and practice as an orthopedic surgeon in Pennsylvania to come to Louisiana and volunteer to care for hurricane victims. ‘People were dying, and I was the only doctor on the tarmac (at the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport) where scores of nonresponsive patients lay on stretchers. Two patients died in front of me.’

‘I showed him (the U.S. Coast Guard official in charge) my medical credentials. I had tried to get through to FEMA for 12 hours the day before and finally gave up. … I asked him to let me stay until I was replaced by another doctor, but he refused. He said he was afraid of being sued. I informed him about the Good Samaritan laws and asked him if he was willing to let people die so the government wouldn’t be sued, but he would not back down. I had to leave.’

FEMA issued a formal response to Perlmutter’s story, acknowledging that the agency does not use voluntary physicians.

‘We have a cadre of physicians of our own,’ FEMA spokeswoman Kim Pease said Thursday. ‘They are the National Disaster Medical Team. The voluntary doctor was not a credentialed FEMA physician and, thus, was subject to law enforcement rules in a disaster area.’ [Note: This comes from the same public relations people that vigorously defended the requirement that 1000 firefighters from other cities undergo a full day of training, including sexual harassment seminars, before they were deployed -- not for search and rescue, but to hand out FEMA leaflets. In response to criticism, another spokeswoman said: 'I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country.' Here's an article with the quote.]

At the triage area in the New Orleans airport, Perlmutter was successful in getting FEMA to accept the insulin and morphine he had brought. ‘The pharmacist told us they were completely out of insulin and our donation would save numerous lives. Still, I felt we were the most-valuable resource, and we were sent away.’

Gerhart said the scene they confronted at the airport was one of ‘hundreds of people lying on the ground, many soaked in their own urine and feces, some [dying] before our eyes.’ FEMA workers initially seemed glad for help and asked Gerhart to work inside the terminal and Perlmutter to work out on the tarmac. They were told only a single obstetrician had been on call at the site for the past 24 hours.

Then, the Coast Guard official informed the group that he could not credential them or guarantee tort coverage and that they should return to Baton Rouge. ‘That shocked me, that those would be his concerns in a time of emergency,’ Gerhart said.

Transported back to Baton Rouge, Perlmutter’s frustrated group went to state health officials who finally got them certified — a very simple process that took only a few seconds.

‘I found numerous other doctors in Baton Rouge waiting to be assigned and others who were sent away, and there was no shortage of need,’ he said.”

My proposal: After what’s happened in New Orleans, we ought to find every government official even tangentially connected with contributing to this human catastrophe and charge them all with criminally negligent homicide or a similar offense. In this case, we had regulations that required military personnel to let American citizens die because of lawsuit fears. Don’t forget the fact that we had a levee system built to fail and local officeholders who had disaster plans tacitly acknowledging that they would allow their constituents to die. We should demolish the Department of Homeland Security, which is ill-equipped to handle a natural disaster, let alone a WMD terrorist event.

The people of this nation, however, will not understand what has happened, for they rarely understand anything. Our government, as it almost always does, failed the American people. This is not a flaw of government; rather, it is the nature of government. It seems that the Bush plan for recovery involves pouring $200 billion into rebuilding places that cannot reasonably be defended from nature, pushing our deficit further into the stratosphere and hastening the frighteningly inevitable economic apocalypse. The folks in Washington are fiddling while everything burns down. I’ve told y’all before and I’ll tell y’all again: If you’re in my age bracket, you will live to see the United States become a Third World country.