Hacker News Reader

Comment by amekp | Hacker News Reader

More totalitarianism. People are treated like a mixture between children and cattle.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hospital-errors-lead-to-dead-pa...

While this is a horrifying story, I'm having a hard time seeing the relevance here. There is nothing in the article indicating that the errors were caused by the family agreeing to organ donation.

Had the family not agreed to organ donation, they wouldn’t have planned to harvest the organs in the first place.

"Medical errors kill almost 100000 Americans a year" [1]

You're picking one horror story because it fits your parameters, and pretending it's something to worry about. It's not. Cheers.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1117251/

I'm not aware that a medical procedure is opt-out, I always assumed it was voluntary.

Unlike this state mandated organ seizure, if you haven't heard the news and opt-out of yet another thing.

There are about a million other things done to dead bodies that will kill a mistakenly-identified-as-dead person as stone dead as removing an organ, so organ donation specifically doesn't really have a special status here outside of it being potentially the first item on the long checklist.

Emergency procedures are often done without consent. Because patients are often unconscious and cannot give consent. Just like in your story.

The article you linked is a truly horrifying thought.

I wonder though if a change like this would reduce those cases in the long term though. If there are more organs available, wouldn't there be less pressure to harvest from any particular person?

"More totalitarianism"

Nonsense. Absolute and utter nonsense.

There's an opt-out.

> There's an opt-out.

That was the spammer's excuse 10 years ago.

What relevance does a 10 year old article from a US hospital have on this UK news?

As long as the opt-out is respected I also don't see what's totalitarian about it.

how is totalitarianism giving the option to opt-out?

"If you don't like government ideas, why don't you move somewhere else?"

Moving out is the best opt-out ever. (until pandemic hits and you can't move out)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com