LOOK OUT GRANDMA….DEATH PANELS ARE BACK :BETSY McCAUGHEY
http://nypost.com/2015/07/12/end-of-life-counselling-death-panels-are-back/
Look out, Grandma: Medicare said on Wednesday it wants to start paying for end-of-life counseling.
It’s being sold as “death with dignity,” but it’s more like dying for dollars. Seniors are nudged to forego life-sustaining procedures and hospital care to go into hospice. That enriches the booming hospice industry and also frees up dollars for the left’s favored social causes.
Why is the government meddling with how we cope with death? The Institute of Medicine doesn’t mince words. Scrimping on seniors will free up money “to fund highly targeted and carefully tailored social services for both children and adults.” Just like ObamaCare. Robbing Grandma to spread the wealth.
In 2009, President Obama said seniors are getting too many procedures and maybe they’re “better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.” Obama’s health guru Ezekiel Emanuel argues the elderly should be a lower priority because “they have already had more life-years.”
It’s the perfect storm of ideology and industry greed, with hospice providers lobbying lawmakers to make end-of-life counseling the standard.
And not just once. Hospice advocates want to drill their morbid message into patients’ heads. “It has to be a series of recurring conversations over years,” an industry representative insists.
Imported from Europe, the hospice industry has boomed — and taken a sharp turn from nonprofit to aggressively for-profit. Revenues are up 500 percent since 2000, and the industry is flexing its muscle in state capitols and Washington, DC.
In 2010, industry lobbyists convinced New York lawmakers to compel all doctors to offer end-of-life counseling to patients with terminal illnesses. New York’s law imposes heavy fines, even jail time, on doctors who don’t.
The state’s physicians protested that some patients will break down at the mention of hospice and give up on life. Other doctors have patients who are religiously or culturally opposed. But the law prohibits exemptions.
Advocates say end-of-life counseling is always voluntary for the patient. Technically that may be true, but if your doctor faces penalties for not doing it, you’re going to feel pressured to go along.
That was the problem with the end-of-life counseling provision in an early draft of ObamaCare in 2009. It said Medicare would pay doctors for end-of-life counseling. Fine.
But the bill went on to prescribe what doctors would have to discuss. That’s not fine.
Uncle Sam can’t possibly know better than your family, the doctor at your bedside and maybe your minister or rabbi.
And the provision would’ve punished doctors who didn’t go along, which the Institute of Medicine is calling for again.
A doctor’s quality rating (and pay from Medicare) would have depended partly on the proportion of patients who had advanced directives and how many adhered to them. Hardly voluntary if your doctor’s pay depends on your sticking to your “Do Not Resuscitate” order.
Trouble is, some seniors who could survive their illness and go home are pressured into forgoing medical care. Advocates parrot the statistic that 25 percent of Medicare hospital expenditures are for the last year of life.
That’s like harping on how often Babe Ruth struck out.
Three-quarters of the time, this care is helping seniors. A major study of 208 California hospitals proves that spending more on Medicare patients leads to substantially higher survival rates. More seniors in these higher-spending hospitals make it home and resume their lives.
Despite the consequences of coaxing seniors into less care, Jeb Bush is on the bandwagon, saying seniors should be forced to fill out an advanced directive in order to get Medicare.
His Republican rivals should make it clear they won’t give the government control over this highly personal decision.
Betsy McCaughey is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.
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