[BETTY] ROLLIN: Our medical system can’t keep everyone healthy, but it excels at keeping people alive, which is expensive. Twenty-five percent of all Medicare spending is for the 10 percent of patients who are in their final year of life. For the year 2012 alone, that’s expected to be $137 billion. Most of the money is spent in the last 6 months of life, which is often of little benefit, if any, to the patient. And the conversations between patients and doctors and family members which might make a difference, Dr. Forrow says, aren’t happening, partly because people are afraid to talk about death and because the part of the Obama health care reform plan, which would have reimbursed doctors for these conversations, was shot down.
DR. [LACHLAN] FORROW: Cheap, political, inflammatory comments like “death panels” and “pulling the plug on grandma” for cheap political points have terrified the American people in a way that I think””I think that’s immoral.
ROLLIN: Dr. Susan Mitchell, who has studied advance dementia in nursing home patients, has found that even though these patients can be treated and kept more comfortable in a nursing home, they are often hospitalized where they receive aggressive and sometimes painful treatment that is covered by Medicare.
I wish they’d just say it, “Why can’t these people just do their patriotic duty and die!” You know they wanted to.
Thank you for posting this. I teach Intro to Philosophy at the local college. Ethics gets about a third-plus of the semester. Real-world issues are challenging — and give the course greater value. Our inability to come to terms with this issue is simply incredible to me — but it is good to have a very current statement of the problem to work with. BTW, thank you also for the stimulating post from Robert Samuelson above.