End the Schiavo obsession
By TIMES EDITORIALS
Published July 22, 2006
The Florida Health Department is the latest casualty in what can be described, more than a year after Terri Schiavo's passing, as an unhealthy political obsession. When will Gov. Jeb Bush move on?
By interfering in the normal professional oversight of a nurse who took care of Schiavo, Bush only taints everyone involved. Already, he has made Health Secretary Francois Rony look the part of a political lap dog. Rony's agency had insisted that divulging patient information was a violation of state code until Bush picked up the phone. Now Rony wants the disciplinary case against Carla Sauer-Iyer dropped altogether.
Sauer-Iyer, of course, was an outspoken supporter of Bush's attempts to use executive and legislative power to prevent a court from ordering Schiavo's feeding tube removed. She gave an affidavit in the unsuccessful attempt to defend Terri's Law in the courts.
Sauer-Iyer also talked about her patient's condition on CNN and Fox News, but Bush argues that she only disclosed what she already had answered in the affidavit. That's not true, as Times writer Lorri Helfand reports. Her TV remarks - that Terri ate pudding, milkshakes and needed just "a little therapy" to awake from her 15-year-long vegetative state - went well beyond the affidavit.
Regardless, the decision on whether to sanction Sauer-Iyer is supposed to be in the hands of the state Board of Nursing, and it supposed to based on a dispassionate professional assessment of her actions. The fact that she did a favor for the governor is supposed to be immaterial.
In the past three years, Bush has deployed attorneys, lawmakers, prosecutors and abuse investigators in his bid to prove an evil plot that never existed. Now, he's asking nursing regulators to wink and follow his lead. When will he stop?
Correction:
A July 16 editorial on Halliburton's excessive billing practices should have made clear that a military logistics contract that the Army won't be renewing with Halliburton was initially awarded to the company through a competitive bid.