He's yours, you know, that pathetic foster child with an impaired mind and a diseased liver. If you live in Florida, he's your kid.
That makes it your ethical responsibility to make sure he doesn't die because the state's too chintzy to provide proper care.
When agents of the state rescue a child from his crackhead mom, responsibility for the kid automatically reverts to the rest of us. If he's sick, we're obligated to provide the same basic treatment we'd demand for one of our own children. It's our duty to pay his hospital bills. Find him a proper place to live.
That's the way it's supposed to work in a civilized society. Civilized folks don't indulge in a kind of backdoor euthanasia because our underfunded, overstressed foster-care system can't cope with a tough case.
Like I say, that's the way it's supposed to work.
In a civilized society.
In Florida . . . maybe not.
The Miami Herald's Carol Marbin Miller discovered that a 15-year-old foster child in Central Florida nearing the final, fatal stages of liver disease had been removed from the donor-organ waiting list. Administrators at Shands Hospital in Gainesville deemed him an unworthy transplant candidate because the state couldn't guarantee him a safe, stable post-op living environment necessary for a transplant patient's recovery.
By the way, that was your kid. Left to die the way primitive nomadic tribes once abandoned their sick and elderly.
Shands (employing some twisted medical ethics) concluded that our foster-care system was too inept to keep a fragile child alive. ''We truly believe the worst thing you can do is perform an organ transplant on a patient who has a high probability of an unsuccessful outcome,'' a hospital official told Marbin Miller.
What the hell does this say about us? That we're so negligent when it comes to sick, disabled, dying foster children that the very doctors who could save their lives shrug and ask, ``Why bother?''
Carol's story sent a wave of embarrassment through the system. There were indications that Jackson Memorial Hospital might intervene and save us from this particular ignominy. The kid reportedly was on his way to the Miami hospital on Wednesday.
But it's difficult not to suspect that without an outrageous story in The Miami Herald, the dying kid would have been shrugged off as just another fatal case of tough luck.
Of course, Florida does splurge on some children. Like Michael Hernandez. We'll spend plenty on Michael. Rather than contemplate a plea deal for anything less than 50 years, the Miami-Dade state attorney's office is going all-out with a first-degree murder trial for young Hernandez -- arrested one day after his 14th birthday for stabbing a classmate.
Because of pretrial publicity, his trial (along with a judge, defendant, prosecutors, witnesses, defense lawyers, bailiffs, etc.) must be moved to Orlando. No one has tallied the cost, but the Ocala Star-Banner reported last year that Citrus County spent an extra $574,000 to move child-killer John Couey's trial to Miami.
The Hernandez change of venue will top that, of course. But these are the expenditures that tell us who we are. We're glad to spend several million bucks to lock up a mentally unhinged teenager for the rest of his life.
But to save a foster child from a fatal disease? Hey. These are tough times. Got to teach these kids they can't have everything.
