The Essential Need for Elective Surgery – By Richard Menger and Chris Karas (American Spectator) / April 30 2020
COVID-19 has led to surgeries being mostly cut out of our medical system. That could be fatal.
COVID-19 and the response to COVID-19 has resulted in the near complete cancellation of elective surgical cases across the United States. The volume of surgery has sunk to its nadir in a society in which the financial viability of our health-care systems and the quality of our citizens’ lives are directly proportional to that very surgical volume.
Elective surgeries are just now starting to be performed again, and debate surrounds their integration. The necessary delay, rationing, and cancellation of surgeries is now a true public health challenge. The bottleneck of multiple specialties will be desperately trying to get cases done with an already limited asset: operating rooms.
Guidelines about when to perform surgery during the COVID-19 crisis by the American College of Surgeons attempted to balance public health and the infinite variables of doctor–patient interactions. They were and are necessarily limiting. We absolutely do not and cannot label the guidelines as unwise in any way. Rather, we want to point out that these guidelines, already put into motion, have lasting effects individually, communally, and ideologically.
Shutting down surgery, just like shutting down the economy, hurts people too. It’s just harder to find the direct link. But the surgery shutdown is impacting a wide variety of patients. Each decision regarding the cancellation of a surgery was a form of a risk-benefit decision.
Continue to article: https://spectator.org/the-essential-need-for-elective-surgery/
