OH YEAH!
OK, say I have a cancer patient: My company pays for pain meds, anxiety meds, constipation, fever..... you know - symptoms related to their terminal disease.
Soooo.... Most of my patients have issues OTHER than their terminal disease; say high blood pressure, heart problems, or diabetes. In many cases, folks have been on the correct medications for these conditions for decades!
All of a sudden, just because they were on Hospice, Medicare just decided they weren’t paying for these “other condition maintenance meds” any more. They did this overnight one night with NO prior warning to anybody.
What a mess. We were all jumping through hoops and layers of bureaucrats just to get meds for our patients!
Say you’re dying of cancer but have a few months left. You are trying to enjoy what time you have left with your family. All of a sudden, you can’t get your diabetes medication. Your blood sugar shoots up. When your sugar is up your immune system is compromised. You get pneumonia and die. The cause of death was pneumonia secondary to hyperglycemia; not cancer.
The bureaucrats killed one of my patients MONTHS before his time in just that fashion.
Thanks for sharing your experiences.
” You get pneumonia and die.” — this IS the objective. The sooner the patients die, the more money is saved, this is the objective of Obamacare. To think that many older people voted for him because they believed the lies Obama told them that Republicans are trying to take away their Medicare.
This needs to be publicized, people need to wise up, preferably before the next elections.
Thanks, this explains an important point.
Sometimes, especially with out-patient hospice, it takes time for the terminal disease to run its course.