The Public Option Death Panel

Here’s a death panel even Sarah Palin could love — but maybe we’d better not tell her. You, however, will probably understand its value and possibly want to put it to work for your own benefit. It centers around a form called POLST, for Physician Order for Life Sustaining Treatment (in New York it’s MOLST, for Medical Orders) fast catching on across the country. The panel consists, essentially, of your doctor and yourself.

Initially developed in Oregon in 1991, POLST programs are underway in a handfull of states including Washington, California, New York and North Carolina, and are being developed in over a dozen others.

Erin Henke, POLST Program Manager for the California Coalition for Compassionate Care, outlined the program for a group of healthcare professionals this week in San Francisco, part of CCCC’s efforts to get it efficiently established across the state. The key, she emphasized, is the conversation between individual patient and medical professionals. You don’t get the form signed, in other words, unless and until patient and physician have discussed what the former wants: CPR if you’re not breathing? Feeding tube? Comfort care only, if you’re in bad shape, but you’ve got a pulse and are breathing? Or perhaps every intervention possible — tubes, wires, ventilators, the works, including transfer to a hospital intensive care unit. But the point is, you make your own decisions. Once the form is completed and signed, it follows you as part of your medical record. In California it’s printed on Pulsar Pink card stock, and not easy to overlook.

Rollout of the program, Henke explained, is an ongoing process; it will only work when it is widely known and understood not only by individual patients and physicians but also by the many other members of the profession — nurses, caregivers, ER personnel and others. CCCC’s focus right now is on skilled nursing facilities and hospitals, though Henke and the teams of POLST program advocates around the state are working toward a broad educational spectrum.

The basic POLST approach, as explained in a Journal of Palliative Medicine article by Diane E. Meier, M.D. and health care journalist Larry Beresford published earlier this year, is to provide “actionable information on how to honor the wishes of a patient with a life-threatening condition” on a variety of issues. It goes farther than an Advance Directive (though if there’s a discrepancy, the Advance Directive takes precedence) and it differs from an out-of-hospital DNR (Do Not Resusitate) form because it lets you choose treatment.

I asked Henke if the patient/doctor conversation which is necessary in order for this extraordinarily useful document to be completed is covered by most insurance companies. She says that to her knowledge there is no specific code for such a conversation, although she understands there are other codes under which physicians can bill. Let’s hope Betsy McCaughey and Sarah Palin don’t find out. Or Chuck Grassley.

Though I am only terminal just now in the same sense that all of us mortals are, I talked about the POLST form with my Kaiser primary care physician just to be sure we remain on the same page. Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone had that same opportunity.

Palliative Care: Rush Limbaugh vs the Grannies

The patient was in four-point restraint, which means his hands and feet were tied to the bed. He was shouting over and over, in Spanish, “Help me!” but no help came. Until Diane Meier happened upon the scene.

The back story, she learned, was that the man had end-stage cancer for which he had declined treatment. After he fell at home, his adult children had found him on the floor and called 911, landing him back in the hospital. There, among other interventions that were put into play, a feeding tube had been inserted through his nose. When he repeatedly pulled it out, his hands were tied. After he then pulled it out three times with his knees, his feet were tied. You could say these treatments were being performed over the patient’s not-quite-dead-body.

“Why,” Dr. Meier asked, “is it important to have the feeding tube?” The attending physicians answered, “Because if we don’t, he’ll die.”

It was at this point that Diane Meier, M.D., F.A.C.P., already honored for her work in geriatrics and for her personal and medical skills, became a crusader for palliative care. “A light bulb went off,” she told a group of physicians and other professionals in the field today in San Francisco. “I realized it was an educational problem, and thus a solvable problem.” She saw that the doctors and nurses were only doing as they had been taught, and the results were distressing also to many of them. “All I did was say ‘It’s all right to care about your patient.'”

Meier’s pioneering efforts to shift care of critically ill patients from aggressive, often futile treatment to comfort care focusing on the patient instead led to formation of the Center to Advance Palliative Care, which she currently serves as Director. They also resulted in a MacArthur Fellowship she was awarded in September, 2008.

“The MacArthur,” says the self-effacing physician, “was in recognition of the tens of thousands of people working in palliative care.” But those tens of thousands are not enough to have eliminated the tragedies of patients such as the unfortunate man cited above. Walk the halls of almost any hospital, nursing home or similar institution in the U.S. and you will hear the incessant “Help me!” cries of people being treated over their almost-dead bodies.

Helping them with comfort care rather than aggressive treatment, though, is referred to by the Rush Limbaughs of the world as “Killing off the grannies.” It is a handy sound bite, and it is tilting the balance against sanity in our lurch toward health reform. Unless Mr. Limbaugh can convince me I’d rather be 4-point-restrained with a tube inserted in my nose than gently treated with comfort care when I encounter my next critical illness, this particular grannie would appreciate his butting out of my rights. Palliative care should be a right.

It is, unfortunately, a campaign of the political right to keep palliative care out of health reform. They will prevail, Dr. Meier said, unless voices of sanity are raised, whether Democrat or Republican. She urged her audience, representative of a wide variety of compassionate groups, to help get the message out and get the calls, e-mails and letters in. Legislators behind the three bills working their way through Congress, she said, need to hear from the citizenry.

The citizenry is unquestionably in favor of comfort, and where palliative care can be understood it is welcomed. Hosting Dr. Meier’s informal talk were the California HealthCare Foundation, the California Coalition for Compassionate Care, Archstone Foundation and the University of California, San Francisco, four of many organizations committed to making palliative care understood, available and effective.

The question of whether they or Rush Limbaugh will prevail is as yet unanswered. Having Mr. Limbaugh forming our health policy, though, is almost as scary to this granny as 4-point restraint.