Foxfyre wrote:The $5000 figure cited is more than reasonable for somebody who receiving minimal or no medical treatment and is only being kept clean and fed.
OK, I dont know. I would have thought someone in such a serious state would have required (expensive) expert supervision/monitoring, but on the other hand I guess it could be exactly the other way round: someone in a vegetative state doesn't require much. I havent got a clue really.
I only know that the $5,000 figure was footnoted in the pro-life webpage you linked to a local newspaper article (Palm Beach something), while the $500,000 number was cited by BusinessWeek as what unspecified "estimates have placed" it at. Gotta keep looking, I s'pose.
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Here's Slate noting:
Quote:Who's paying for her care?
Schiavo resides at a nonprofit hospice that has assumed part of the cost of her care. Medicaid pays for the rest. According to this
AP story, keeping her alive costs about $80,000 per year, and at least $350,000 of the malpractice settlement awarded to Schiavo and her husband in 1992 has been spent on her care. Florida Medicaid normally offers hospice coverage for those with a life expectancy of no more than six months, but Schiavo has received assistance from the state for the last two years.
And this, interestingly, is
NewsMax:
Quote:Schiavo Money is Just About Exhausted
NewsMax.com Wires
Friday, March 18, 2005
PINELLAS PARK -- As the battle over Terri Schiavo's life rages, the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman lies in a hospice bed, dependent on the institution's charity and Florida taxpayers for her care.
The $1-million received by her and her husband, Michael, in a medical malpractice case in 1993 is nearly gone, attorneys say, spent on her care and the husband's legal quest over the past seven years to stop her artificial feedings so she can die.
Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, want to keep her alive and accuse her husband of wanting Terri dead so he could inherit what was left from the malpractice award. Michael Schiavo has said the rift between him and his in-laws began because he refused to share with them part of the money he received from that award.
But the reality is that hardly anybody is getting paid anymore.
Michael Schiavo's attorneys say they have not been paid in more than two years. Schindler attorney David Gibbs III said he is working for free, although an anti-abortion group, Life Legal Defense Foundation, has paid some of his expenses.
Just $40,000 to $50,000 remains of the money won in the malpractice case after Terri's heart stopped in 1990 and left her in what court-appointed doctors say is a persistent vegetative state.
