It’s usually hard to kill of something that doesn’t exist.
There may not be any death panels, but the rumor that there are such panels just won’t lie down and die no matter how many people from the president on down say it “just isn’t so.”
It’s like trying to stop any rumor, like Elvis lives, which then becomes urban legend, which too many people believe.
If there really were death panels, I be the first to apply for a job on one, because not allowing someone to die or to make his or her own decisions about his or her own end-of-life is as bad as forcing someone to hang on who’s in severely ill and wants to released from his or her pain and suffering.
What it really is -- and something that’s been a MediCare provision for more than 20 years -- is informing patients about their end-of-life options, Living Wills and that sort of thing, which MediCare will pay for.
What is beyond my comprehension is “paying for that service.”
Or experience with a family member who suffered a severe stroke several years ago was this:
During the six agonizing years he survived after a stroke, he must have been seen by two dozen or more different doctors.
Along every step of the way, each doctor told us what his options were after the initial prognosis of “you might want to think about pulling the plug,” because his chances of survival are slim to none.
“Slim to none” turned out to be six miserable years that involved convalescent homes, two doctors forced upon us by his insurance company that were so bad I had to get a restraining order against them to prevent them from coming anywhere near him, several surgeries, feeding tubes, diapers and all kinds of dehumanizing, humiliating experiences for him to endure.
Enduring all that was okay by him, but for a huge number of people it wouldn’t be okay.
They would choose to refuse all treatment including antibiotics that were really what was keep him alive by killing off the myriad of infections that kept attacking his withering body, and that’s where things like Living Will and specific instructions come in.
This is why it is so important for each person -- even the young, not just us old codgers and coderesses -- to plan in advance and decide how we want to exit the world.
The simple act of refusing antibiotics would have put a quick end to the whole affair, because he would have gotten pneumonia and been gone within two or three weeks.
I won’t even go into the expenses involved in keeping a “dead person lying” alive, except to say that in California when you qualify for the MediCal supplement to MediCare, the States places a lien on all property, which must eventually be sold off and the money paid to the State.
In our case, the expenses amassed are more than $5 million dollars and no one except a Got Rocks like the Wall Street thieves and their ilk can afford to stay alive to die anyway days, weeks, months or years down the road.
Six years in a convalescent home to the tune of forty grand a month…and that doesn’t count all the doctors, hospitals and other expenses along the way.
At the end when he went into an irrevocable coma and the antibiotics no longer had any effect, the attending physicians of which there were three, because none of them worked more than three days in a row, still kept informing us of our options.
Not once in that entire six years did any doctor charge us for end-of-life counseling.
So unless you make an appointment with an attorney or with a doctor to take up his office time to specifically discuss the mater, I don’t understand where these charges come from.
Yes, you have to pay for a Living Will just as you have to pay for any last will and testiment, but not for the advice about getting one.
The advice we got was FREE and usually received while we were standing in the hall outside our relative’s room.
