Free Republic

There’s no easy way to discuss end-of-life care. And there’s no easy way for patients and families to make decisions related to it. But there are advances in technology that could help providers frame the discussion to help patients and families better understand their situation and gain confidence in the choice they are making. “I do believe that we’re really at a point that we’re starting to see data analytics and predictive modeling for individuals, especially as we start to look at population health,” says Michael L. Munger, MD, a family physician in Overland Park, Kansas, and president of the...

The crisis in health care is manageable - without the radical, extreme measures passed in the Affordable Care Act.USA Today reports that just 5% of patients account for 50% of health care spending. And just 1% account for 22% of the spending. That's about $90,000 per person, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. U.S. residents spent $1.26 trillion that year on health care.Five percent accounted for 50% of health care costs, about $36,000 each, the report said.The report's findings can be used to predict which consumers are most likely to drive up health care costs and...

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as...

“The fact that you are reading this indicates you escaped the abortion holocaust. But don’t relax yet. We are all candidates for the growing euthanasia movement.” These oft-repeated words of Msgr. William B. Smith, one of the Church’s best moral theologians until his death last year, came to mind as my father lay in the emergency room and a grave-faced doctor called me, my brother and our mother aside for a consultation. Since this was a top-rated yet secular hospital, I was already reviewing in my mind all I knew about Church teaching regarding “ordinary” and extraordinary” care. But I...

The Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, one of the nation’s most highly regarded academic hospitals, has earned a reputation as a place where doctors will go to virtually any length and expense to try to save a patient’s life. “If you come into this hospital, we’re not going to let you die,” said Dr. David T. Feinberg, the hospital system’s chief executive. Yet that ethos has made the medical center a prime target for critics in the Obama administration and elsewhere who talk about how much money the nation wastes on needless tests and futile procedures. They like to note...

Texas law may change to grant families some of doctors' authority On June 10, 2006, aging and ailing, Edith Pereira was taken by ambulance from St. Dominic nursing home to Memorial Hermann Hospital. It might have been nothing that serious. Urinary-tract infections had sent the 91-year-old with Alzheimer's and diabetes to the hospital often in the previous year, and the St. Dominic's nursing staff thought that likely was the problem this time. But Memorial Hermann doctors found no infection. Instead, they said, her altered state — high blood sugar that made her too drowsy and combative to be fed —...

On december 27,2006, kusheland miaskowski' introduced Mr K, a 66-year-old African Ameri­can man who has lived on the streets for nearly 50 years and for most of those years has used heroin and other illicit drugs daily. Mr K was diagnosed with advanced renal adenocarcinoma in February 2002 at a large urban hospital. For unclear reasons, resection was made con­tingent upon cessation of drug use and was not done. There­after, Mr K was lost to follow up for almost a year, until he presented to the emergency department with abdominal pain and heroin withdrawal. He was then referred for palliative...