Posted on 09/12/2009 4:37:34 PM PDT by Starman417
Newsweek, in all of its wisdom, is still arguing that Sarah Palin lied about the death panel provisions in ObamaCare, but we really should have a death panel anyways. The author of the below piece, Evan Thomas, writes that his 79 year old mother wanted to die but the doctors wouldn't let her because the assisted living facility she was staying at was sustained by Medicare. He didn't like this and muses on how we can fix health care in this country by, you guessed it, getting people into hospice care and out of hospitals. People need to die and just get it over with you see:
The idea that we might ration health care to seniors (or anyone else) is political anathema. Politicians do not dare breathe the R word, lest they be accused—however wrongly—of trying to pull the plug on Grandma. But the need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room in the health-reform debate. Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it. At a more basic level, Americans are afraid not just of dying, but of talking and thinking about death. Until Americans learn to contemplate death as more than a scientific challenge to be overcome, our health-care system will remain unfixable.Compared with other Western countries, the United States has more health care—but, generally speaking, not better health care. There is no way we can get control of costs, which have grown by nearly 50 percent in the past decade, without finding a way to stop overtreating patients.
~~~But how do you decide which treatments to cut out? How do you choose between the necessary and the unnecessary? There has been talk among experts and lawmakers of giving more power to a panel of government experts to decide—Britain has one, called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (known by the somewhat ironic acronym NICE). But no one wants the horror stories of denied care and long waits that are said to plague state-run national health-care systems. (The criticism is unfair: patients wait longer to see primary-care physicians in the United States than in Britain.) After the summer of angry town halls, no politician is going to get anywhere near something that could be called a "death panel."
There's no question that reining in the lawyers would help cut costs. Fearing medical-malpractice suits, doctors engage in defensive medicine, ordering procedures that may not be strictly necessary—but why take the risk? According to various studies, defensive medicine adds perhaps 2 percent to the overall bill—a not-insignificant number when more than $2 trillion is at stake. A number of states have managed to institute some kind of so-called tort reform, limiting the size of damage awards by juries in medical-malpractice cases. But the trial lawyers—big donors to the Democratic Party—have stopped Congress from even considering reforms. That's why it was significant that President Obama even raised the subject in his speech last week, even if he was vague about just what he'd do. (Best idea: create medical courts run by experts to rule on malpractice claims, with no punitive damages.)
But the biggest cost booster is the way doctors are paid under most insurance systems, including Medicare. It's called fee-for-service, and it means just that. So why not just put doctors on salary? Some medical groups that do, like the Mayo Clinic, have reduced costs while producing better results. Unfortunately, putting doctors on salary requires that they work for someone, and most American physicians are self-employed or work in small group practices. The alternative—paying them a flat rate for each patient they care for—turned out to be at least a partial bust. HMOs that paid doctors a flat fee in the 1990s faced a backlash as patients bridled at long waits and denied service.
~~~One place to start is to consider the psychological aspect of health care. Most people are at least minor hypochondriacs (I know I am). They use doctors to make themselves feel better, even if the doctor is not doing much to physically heal what ails them. (In ancient times, doctors often made people sicker with quack cures like bleeding.) The desire to see a physician is often pronounced in assisted-living facilities. Old people, far from their families in our mobile, atomized society, depend on their doctors for care and reassurance. I noticed that in my mother's retirement home, the talk in the dining room was often about illness; people built their day around doctor's visits, partly, it seemed to me, to combat loneliness.
~~~Other initiatives ensure that the elderly get counseling about end-of-life issues. Although demagogued as a "death panel," a program in Wisconsin to get patients to talk to their doctors about how they want to deal with death was actually a resounding success. A study by the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that such conversations between doctors and patients can decrease costs by about 35 percent—while improving the quality of life at the end. Patients should be encouraged to draft living wills to make their end-of-life desires known. Unfortunately, such paper can be useless if there is a family member at the bedside demanding heroic measures. "A lot of the time guilt is playing a role," says Dr. David Torchiana, a surgeon and CEO of the Massachusetts General Physicians Organization. Doctors can feel guilty, too—about overtreating patients. Torchiana recalls his unease over operating to treat a severe heart infection in a woman with two forms of metastatic cancer who was already comatose. The family insisted.
~~~Our medical system does everything it can to encourage hope. And American health care has been near miraculous—the envy of the world—in its capacity to develop new lifesaving and life-enhancing treatments. But death can be delayed only so long, and sometimes the wait is grim and degrading. The hospice ideal recognized that for many people, quiet and dignity—and loving care and good painkillers—are really what's called for.
Conservatives have said for a long time that we need tort reform, as the author agrees. We also agree that many times there are way too many tests run, a byproduct of the malpractice suits against doctors. Fix one and the other will fix itself.
But then the author ventures into the real meat of his story. People just need to learn to die and get out of the way.
But the thing is we DO NOT want the government making that decision. If a person wants to die and stop treatment that should be up to them, no outside entity or bureaucrat should make that decision and NO encouragement to end their life should be given.
What should we expect with a kind of system the Newsweek author wants?
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net
Start with the Newsweek guy
The Gov't has no business making life or death decisions. Health care should remain a private enterprise and the life of every american respected!
liberalism, the death cult....blood has dripped from their hands for the last 30 some years, and now they want to engorge themselves even more.....
“There is no way we can get control of costs, which have grown by nearly 50 percent in the past decade, without finding a way to stop overtreating patients.”
If these people want less healthcare, I am willing to give them a break on the cost if they reduce their share. I don’t see why that should entitle them to tell me that I must take less healthcare as well, though. It’s none of their damn business how much healthcare I buy with my own money. And if their complaint is that the taxpayer is picking up some of the bill for some people, that’s their own damn fault. Tell everyone that they’ve got to pay for what they use.
They should have their employees sign up.
The Repubs are just demagoguing this issue.
OTOH, the government should not be in the business to begin with.
new and improved...now with Grandma!
-PJ
The above statement is a bald faced lie. I can get into see my primary in a day, or a few hours if I claim emergency. In GB and Canada, here's how it works, you get an appointment for your primary, you may or may not get in quickly, that isn't the problem. The problem is when they need to see a specialist and need tests scheduled, MRIs for instance. That is where the waiting periods come into play and they cause the deaths of many people who wait for treatment until they simply die from the disease.
What's ironic is Mr. Thomas doesn't realize that it's Government Run Health Care (Medicare) that prevented his mother from realizing her wishes.
As far as I know that is flat out not true. But for arguments sake let's say that is true, the author conveniently avoids highlighting the delay in getting treatment, tests, operations, etc. He glosses over it at the beginning of the article and then omits the delays when it is most germane(sic?).
Although demagogued as a "death panel," a program in Wisconsin to get patients to talk to their doctors about how they want to deal with death was actually a resounding success.
It was such a success that, apparently, we know all about it because the author neglects to tell us what the criteria was met to claim it a resounding success.
This is once again Newsweak attempting to spin furiously the fact that a federal takeover would necessitate rationing. The bottom line is that if a person is deemed to be dead in six months and thus is denied treatments, surgery, etc. then why not a year to start the cutoff? How about two or five or ten? This is exactly what Ezekiel Rahm promotes (15yrs to 40yrs) to provide smarter "choices" under a federally-controlled health care system.
Now that's (scarily) funny!
A fatal disease, no matter what you do. So, don't treat it, you are only 40 and it takes years, with treatment, before a person wastes away to the point they die from it, but we can hasten that along can't we? There are better examples, for instance let's take cancer of the liver, it will usually kill you, but you can prolong it, lots of young people get it, the death panels would say, WTH, you are going to die anyway so here is the blue pill, doesn't matter how old you are. Cancer survival rates will be much less than they are now. Ditto other diseases.
Deformed babies, dead. downs syndrome? dead.Did you see the baby in England recently that lived because the "allowed" the mother to hold it, they were just letting it die, until it decided to live and then they finally treated it. It didn't meet the criteria of the death panels of GB by two days, so it had to die. It got lucky, many others haven't, they simply were left to die. Of course people like you who think one of your tax dollars might be spent on keeping a baby a live don't really care do you?
Kill the Bill. I'll make my own decisions about treatment whether you like it or not.
It was a resounding success because 32% of the patients took the hemlock. I think most people can get an appointment with a primary care physician immediately if they insist.
My mom is 97 and she wants to live. I intend to support that position.
We have stand alone, doc in a box medical clinics in this country. Wake up at six with a problem, you are in by 8 am. You can pay cash if you like.
The thing that’s the most disgusting to me about this is that Evan Thomas has enough money to take care of his mother on his own. Why didn’t he do that?
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