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NEWS & LETTERS, October - November 2007
Workshop Talks
Katrina’s real culprits, scapegoated victims
by Htun Lin
A year ago, Louisiana’s attorney general charged a highly respected doctor and two nurses with murder in the deaths of four patients at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans during evacuations after Hurricane Katrina. This moral grandstanding by a bourgeois official is reminiscent of the Terri Schiavo case.
A few weeks ago all three were cleared by a grand jury. The case continues to resonate with those of us who face crises everyday in the health care work place because of capitalism’s neglect.
Dr. Anna Pou had been practicing medicine for more than 15 years. As Katrina approached, Dr. Pou headed to Memorial, where she was on call. After the storm passed on Monday, she was offered the chance to leave but chose to stay with her patients.
By late Tuesday, the hospital was flooded with ten feet of water and completely without power. Ventilators stopped, there was no telephone service and limited food, all in 110 degree heat. Patients lay soaking amidst squalor. Nurses broke the windows for air.
The seventh floor was most critical. A separate company called Lifecare ran a facility there for the severely ill. Their doctors didn’t show--health care subcontractors in business to milk Medicare dollars are often willing to hire untrained, unqualified and unmotivated staff. But Dr. Pou and a handful of other doctors and nurses did what they could.
By nightfall Wednesday, Memorial was a hellhole. The hospital had become a death trap. By Thursday morning, another ten patients were dead. Then word spread that no organized rescue would be coming. Dr. Pou called these "battlefield conditions"--except that on an actual battlefield, the military brags about all the wounded being evacuated and treated promptly.
Dr. Pou and her nurses provided comfort care and medicine to alleviate suffering for all their patients, including the four cited in the legal case. Dr. Pou says. "I did the best I could under these dreadful conditions that I did not create, but were created by the fact that we were abandoned."
"Did you figure at any point that you were really done for?" Morley Safer asked Dr. Pou on "60 Minutes." She replied, "I don’t think anyone gave up hope. I can tell you that I didn’t give up hope, because as a cancer specialist, what I do is I give hope to my patients. You know, I am hope."
This is the kind of human response that workers and only frontline workers can give. Health care workers like Dr. Pou confront human tragedy every day, whether that is from disease or abandonment by a diseased society. Abandonment rips apart a sense of community. Abandonment is the norm under capitalism’s constant crises. Genuine health care is not possible in such a society.
Current HMO restructuring shifts the burden of health care onto individual worker's families, forcing many to join the ranks of the uninsured. We are operating under an ideology of abandonment. Governments and corporations supposedly underwrite the cost of health care. In reality they spend their waking hours trying to figure out how to write off whole segments of society.
The culprits here are not the abandoned health care workers. It is American civilization that is on trial. It is the Bush government, which is guilty of gross negligence in the man-made disaster that followed Katrina. Bush only personifies the imperatives of capitalism, which is an ongoing chronic disaster for humanity.
To capitalists, health care is either an expense or a profit center. Dr. Pou and her staff waiting for rescue helicopters that would not come is only an extreme version of the daily abandonment we feel on the shop floor. Like them we cooperate to make the best of a bad situation when critical resources are not available because capitalists’ objectivity sees health care only as numbers in a ledger.
In a human society people would not find themselves in such circumstances. Dr. Pou and others who stayed with the patients made a difference. They saved many who would not have survived were it not for their direct intervention. The problem remains, how can we workers, through our cooperation, get rid of this society that is putting us into these extreme inhuman situations?
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