Rachel Nyirahabiyambere with two of her grandchildren in 2008.
Posted on 03/10/2011 12:13:39 PM PST by wagglebee
Rachel Nyirahabiyambere with two of her grandchildren in 2008.
WASHINGTON, D.C., March 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Rwandan immigrant who survived the genocide of 1994 has now had her life cut off by starvation and dehydration, reportedly because a U.S. hospital affiliated with Georgetown University decided that caring for the woman who lost her health insurance was too expensive.
The New York Times reports that Rachel Nyirahabiyambere, a 58-year-old grandmother and refugee from war-torn Rwanda, has been denied food and water since Feb. 19 after her feeding tube was removed.
“It’s all about money,” son Jerome Ndayishimiye, 33, told the Times.
“Now we are powerless spectators, just watching our mother die,” he said. “In our culture, we would never sentence a person to die from hunger.”
Unlike the Terri Schiavo case, every one of Nyirahabiyambere’s family members has been pleading for her right to live. Since last April, Nyirahabiyambere had been severely disabled after suffering a stroke. For eight months, she had been under the care of Georgetown University Hospital, a non-profit entity run by the MedStar Health Corporation and affiliated with the eponymous Catholic university.
But the Times reports that the hospital, frustrated by the woman’s lack of insurance and inability to pay her medical bills, sought a court in Alexandria, Virginia to appoint a guardian for Nyirahabiyambere who would take the grandmother off their hands, on the basis that the family would not make a decision.
The Times reports that Nyirahabiyambere’s sons – immigrants who fled the violence in Rwanda and earned their way from menial jobs to master’s degrees – lost control of their mother’s situation when Judge Nolan B. Dawkins of Alexandria Circuit Court appointed attorney Andrea Sloan as her guardian, despite an apparent conflict of interest: Sloan was the guardian recommended by the attorney for Georgetown University Hospital, even though the family had asked for an independent attorney to represent their mother’s interests.
The Times reports that Sloan then transferred the mother to a nursing home in Millersville, Maryland. The hospital then agreed to pay the costs of nursing home care – but the financial burden assumed by Georgetown University Hospital in that situation was also shortlived. Sloan made arrangements to put Nyirahabiyambere in hospice care and have her feeding tube withdrawn, leaving her to starve to death.
Sloan explained to the Times that the family did not have a right to consume hospital resources that might be allocated to others with better chances of recovery.
“Hospitals cannot afford to allow families the time to work through their grieving process by allowing the relatives to remain hospitalized until the family reaches the acceptance stage, if that ever happens,” Andrea Sloan told the Times in an e-mail. “Generically speaking, what gives any one family or person the right to control so many scarce health care resources in a situation where the prognosis is poor, and to the detriment of others who may actually benefit from them?”
The Times reports that one of Nyirahabiyambere sons protested in a letter to Sloan that “Ending someone’s life by hunger is morally wrong and unrecognized in the culture of the people of Rwanda.”
Sloan, however, responded that she was trying to understand “your culture” and asked flippantly, “Feeding tubes are not part of your culture, are they?”
She said that unless they could prove their mother would like to live “with a feeding tube, in diapers, with no communication with anyone and in a nursing home” that she would not reinstate the feeding tube.
The Times notes that Nyirahabiyambere, the wife of a Baptist minister, came to the United States after surviving the horrors of the Rwandan genocide and violence in refugee camps that divided her family, made her a widow, and forced her to survive in the jungle for a time. Her sons, who became U.S. citizens, brought her to America, where she found work that gave her health care benefits.
Nyirahabiyambere, however, lost her health insurance because she left her job to follow her oldest son to Virginia and help take care of his grandchildren. Generally, U.S. health insurance is employer-based, and not portable for an individual that switches jobs.
Georgetown University Hospital, which says on its website that they provide “physicial and spiritual comfort to patients and families in the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis – care of the person,” declined to tell the Times why they had washed their hands of Nyirahabiyambere’s case and omitted to intervene in Sloan’s course of action.
LifeSiteNews.com contacted the Maryland nursing home Wednesday where Nyirahabiyambere resided, but a spokeswoman said no one would be able to talk about her case, or even confirm if she were alive or dead.
Bobby Schinder of the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network told LSN that he was trying to establish contact with the family, but admitted that at this late stage there might be little that could be done.
I wonder if it being a nominally Catholic hospital was
one reason it made the Times. Say what you like about the
NYT, this is to their credit.
my thought exactly...or send her home, for family to care for.
With a good air mattress to prevent bedsores, the care is “full time” but not a lot of time for such people.
And often they “wake up” with family care...and getting rid of the sedatives given by hospital staff.
Yes, I think there’s two possible reasons why this story made the NY Times, when probably dozens or hundreds of patients are treated like this by hospitals every day.
One, is that they saw an opportunity to make trouble for a “Catholic” hospital.
Another is that she is an African immigrant and a woman, and thereby politically correct in the extreme as a victim.
Neither would I. Perhaps you missed the part about torturing the patient to death for not paying her bill. I hope you would call that callous, at the very least.
Indeed I would call it the opposite... generous.
I don't think they're generous.
Correct. It apparently was their decision to ignore that responsibility and leave it up to the hospital/court/government/taxpayers to deal with.
There has to be a better way to care for people who need care, but don’t need major hospital-only special care; things that family could learn to do.
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There are home care nurses, which might be an option for some. I think that one of the biggest obstacles is that most of us don't live in an extended family group, and also that so many women work. It's a complicated situation.
I may be wrong, but it’s my impression that the Jesuits may tend to have a bit of an issue regarding humility.
But it also brings up another point: at what point is it truly no longer worth the cost to keep a patient alive? It sounds cold, and it is .... but care like this is very expensive, and it takes money away from cases where care could actually do some good.
It's a difficult debate.
Not sure which part is sarcasm, but I'm going to answer like you're entirely serious.
Note that this is a "death panel" decision of the sort that some folks think that only Obamacare can institute. This story merely demonstrates the truth that "death panels" have existed for a long time.
The cost (assuming it's done in-home, which is easily done if relatives are willing) is around $40K per year. Yes, this is a lot of money, but not unusually high in terms of medical care.
Additionally, with rehabilitative therapy many people can be taught to swallow on their own and be fed by family members (had Terri Schiavo been allowed to continue therapy, she almost certainly would have reached this point) and at this point the cost is really no more than the cost of feeding anyone else.
There were certainly other options, including getting this woman into a palliative care facility and then suing the sons for financial support, if need be. A convicted murderer -- an unwanted cur dog --- would have gotten infinitely more consideration than this harmless, blameless and defenceless old woman.
I agree the article was not that well written.
You are correct that the sons were basically blindsided by this and had no idea what to do or what their rights were. They have been contacted by pro-life advocates who are very knowledgeable in this area. Hopefully it's not too late.
The destruction of the family is a tragedy which will cause many, many problems. Not just the “husband and wife and 2 kids” family, but the Grandpa and Grandma and Uncles and Aunties family.
sorry for the delay on this - no quote, but the article made a special point about mentioning that the sons came over first, became citizens, got their degrees and then brought their mother over - and that she was able to get a job with benefits. I’m assuming that they would have also mentioned that she became a citizen if that was the case.
just did some more research - according to http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/us/04immigrant.html she’s a “legal immigrant” but not a citizen.
Which isn't what's being done in this case, apparently -- she's in a hospital, which costs a lot more.
I agree with you, that the family members could most likely shoulder some portion of the care and costs. Right now, though, the hospital is having to do so.
According to the article, "The hospital then agreed to pay the costs of nursing home care – but the financial burden assumed by Georgetown University Hospital in that situation was also shortlived."
According to this site, Nursing Home care costs somewhere on the order of $235-260/day in Maryland, depending on location and type of room -- close to $100k/year.
Add additional medical costs (such as feeding tube stuff) and you're adding in thousands (or, probably, tens of thousands) more to the yearly tab.
One can see why Georgetown might feel the hurt from a long-term committment like that.
You must not be Catholic.......we are not so nice in describing them. Enough said.
Thank you-I appreciate you getting back to me!
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