Just About the Most Horrible Thing I've Ever Heard

From The Daily Telegraph, an Australian newspaper that I'm pretty sure is somehow connected to Rupert Mudock and NewsCorp.

Anyway, the article is about how doctors in a New Orleans hospital were forced to euthanize terminally ill and fatally injured patients when it became clear that help would not arrive in time to save them. Rather than let them die in agony, or excessively prolonged agony, in some cases, these doctors elected to administer morphine overdoses to end the patients' lives in a more humane way.

My problem with this isn't the euthanasia. These were unimaginable circumstances where normal ethics and morality did not apply. To say otherwise would simply be an exercise in ignorance. My issue with this article, and why it's just about the most horrible thing I've ever heard, is that the situation was allowed to progress to the point where this could even be considered a viable option.

I mean, just what in the god damned hell do you have to do in order to fuck up this badly? One of the basic concepts of bureaucracy is that it is so compartmentalized that each division should be theoretically capable of operating on its own, completely independent of its supervising authority. The system was designed so that incompetence at the highest level of leadership would be, at worst, inconvenient.

Everyone knows how hard it is to cut through the red tape to make a process easier. But damn, can you imagine what has to be done to cut the tape to make something harder?

Via the AMERICAblog.