Tag: Advance Directives

General interest/Health/Money/Politics & Causes/USA
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Tracking Down a Rumor

by Fran Johns

Rumors come, and don’t seem to go. Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes of the New York Times have weighed in again today with a few facts… just in case anyone is interested in facts:

The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.

Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

Rutenberg and Calmes point out that the doggedly persistent rumor “was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.

Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor).

This is the core of what all reasonable people know:

There is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a cost-cutting measure.

But as T/S Contributor Andy Geiger points out, the real issue in health reform is that people are suffering because they don’t have health coverage. Opponents to any reform at all have found a handy way to create this smokescreen by keeping everyone riled up with an utterly false rumor.

I’ve spent much of my adult life working for better end-of-life care, including being forever on a soapbox urging everyone, not just seniors, to consider their end-of-life options, have conversations, create advance directives and then get on with living. I strongly, fully support the good provision in the health care bills that may indeed now get cut.

But we need not to lose this forest for a tree. Rational people have got to continue fighting for a decent system, a decent bill.

False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots – NYTimes.com.

General interest/Health/Money
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Affordable Health Reform

by Fran Johns

It was actually spoken out loud on NewsHour Friday night: we could have a workable, affordable healthcare system if we would address the excessive costs that go into the last six months of life, particularly the last few days. The remark was immediately followed by the standard caveat: of course, no one is going to suggest doing this.

Good grief, why not? Everybody knows it, a few others have even said it out loud. Sure, it’s political suicide, but if someone were ever brave enough to fall on that particular sword there would be a lot of people around to pull out the sword, cleanse the wound and stand him or her back upright.

It could be done. If individual choice were encouraged and enabled. If physicians had to be honest about the quality of life (if any, usually for a few days or weeks) being bought with aggressive treatment at life’s end. If futile treatment were avoided. If protections were put in place for physicians and hospitals complying with the above, since fear of lawsuit is behind most of the mess. If all of us began to look at — and make clear — what extreme measures we would or would not want.

Big ifs. But the reward would be a workable, affordable system.

General interest
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A Novel Idea for Healthcare Reform

by Fran Johns

Not long ago I attended an event at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, featuring a speech by the President’s Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer. Dr. Romer’s talk, “The Great Credit Freeze and the U.S. Economy,” was all about improving healthcare while slowing down the growth of its cost. We know we can’t reduce costs, she said; what we hope to do is reduce the rate of increase. And one way to contain healthcare costs might be to find out what the patient wants. Imagine.

This observation was not in direct response to a question, but could well have been. Dr. Romer was asked, by more than one audience member, about how to address excessive expenditures at the beginning and end of life. A grossly disproportionate share of costs, she conceded, “are spent on the last six months of life. And one thing we’re not doing enough of is letting patients express what they want.”

If the issue were not so grim and sorrowful it would call for a “Well, duh.”

It would be hard to find many people saying they’d like their last few days on this planet to be spent semi-conscious or in pain and distress, hooked up to a tangle of wires and tubes in a blue-lit hospital room (see Scott Bowen’s post 7/14.) But this is in fact the system we have created: we focus on prolongation of life without regard to quality, we aid and abet doctors who equate death with failure, we never talk about our own mortality as if in silence we can become immortal. Most of us would choose to die at home, properly medicated for pain and surrounded by our loved ones; most of us will die in an institution

Audience members had a wide assortment of questions, and Dr. Romer had plenty more to say. But finding out what the patient wants, and acting accordingly, is surely one excellent path towards better care – and even contained cost growth — and everyone in America could begin that process today.

It is an easy solution, even if only a small, partial solution, to this piece of the muddled medi-puzzle of our healthcare system: talk. Tell your doctors, caregivers, loved ones what you do or don’t want. Write it down. Use the forms universally available (Advance Directives, POLST, others.) You might even wind up with what you actually want in your final days. Christina Romer is on your side.

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