UCLA’s Rejection of Heart Patient
The article, “Heart Transplant for Anaheim Man Rejected by UCLA (Dec.3),” is sadly alarming.
A panel of 20 heart transplant specialists have chosen “a combination of oral medication that would allow him to return home” in lieu of more expensive measures that would prolong his life. Why? To give him the opportunity to earn the $50,000 deposit apparently required before proper treatment is administered?
The patient, 29-year-old Hector Bojado, is alive. He walks, he breathes, and he can tell you where it hurts. If we have, as many people seem to believe, a responsibility to the unborn fetus--which can do none of these things--don’t we at least have the same responsibility to all the Hector Bojados already here?
I am saddened that a simple combination of oral medication could become the treatment of choice for less fortunate patients or for patients whom “the predicted outcome after the first year is not good.”
If this lack of consistency prevails, I will also need some of that medication; I already feel a little sick.
ROBERT T. BOFINGER
El Toro
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