• News
• Sports
• Opinion
• A&E
• Multimedia
• Features
• Obituaries
• Blogs

  Home Page » Opinion » Editorial » National Emergency

National emergency

Flu pandemic an occasion to make exceptions

On Friday, President Barack Obama declared a “national emergency with respect to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.” It was a prudent move that others – such as the airlines – should follow.

Declaring a national emergency was not the overreaction it may sound like, but rather a mechanism to get bureaucracy out of the way should the situation warrant it. A pandemic is an appropriate time for waiving rules, and the president’s declaration permits that.

With the declaration, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is empowered to “waive or modify certain requirements of the Medicare, Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance programs and of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Privacy Rule.” The portions of those laws in question concern patient privacy and ensuring that patients are not discriminated against based on how payments may be made.

What this means is if hospitals become overwhelmed, they could segregate flu patients from other patient populations and, if needed, move them to emergency facilities set up in places such as local armories, gymnasiums or parking lot tents. It is standard disaster preparedness, but outside normal practice.

Whether it will be needed, of course, is unknown. But the H1N1 flu is widespread in 46 states, has killed 1,000 Americans since April and hospitalized 20,000.

That is a small fraction of the 36,000 flu deaths in a typical year, but what worries officials is the pattern. Ninety percent of the deaths from seasonal flu are among the elderly, typically those already in poor health. But victims of this so-called swine flu are mostly young. And it spread around the world in record time.

Recognizing that, other exemptions also would be in order – especially those that might encourage sick people to stay home. But as The Denver Post reported Saturday, the airlines have yet to get that message.

Airlines typically charge passengers a hefty fee for changing reservations at the last moment, and a medical exemption requires a note from a doctor. That makes business sense in normal times, as do the hospital rules Sebelius now can suspend.

But prospective passengers are getting a triply contradictory message: They are being told not to travel if they are sick. Airline passengers are in close proximity for long periods, flights are full and ventilation is minimal. But passengers also are charged more – in the Post’s example, a couple paid an extra $200 – to change their tickets without a doctor’s note. And they are told not to seek medical care unless symptoms are severe so as to not overload the system.

Surely there is some work-around for that. A little presidential jawboning might help. So would a bit of civic-minded crisis management on the part of the airlines. After all, would waiving the fee for anyone who claims to have the flu for the duration of flu season really cost that much? Would it cost more than the absenteeism among cabin attendants it might prevent?

Or perhaps the simple route would work best. Clinics and medical practices could Xerox a doctor’s note and just put a stack by the door. Nobody can read those signatures anyway.

No one knows whether this pandemic will amount to a real emergency, let alone one of disastrous proportions. But influenza always has that potential. Reasonable exemptions from everyday rules make sense.