by Joseph P. Shapiro

About the author: Joseph P. Shapiro is a senior editor for U.S. News & World Report. His articles on disability and social policy issues have appeared in numerous publications, including U.S. News & World Report, the Progressive, the Disability Rag, and the Washington Post.

The intensive care unit was the wrong place to put a young man like Larry James McAfee. It was a stopping-off point for patients near death. But McAfee was not dying; he wasn’t even sick. Trapped in his hospital bed, he felt as if the weeks were ticking off in slow motion while around him the intensive care unit seemed to whir at hyperspeed. Patients were wheeled in from surgery or wheeled out to the morgue, nurses and doctors hurried through, machines hummed, and...