From PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE:
While U.S. House members prepare for a meaningless vote on repeal of the Obama health care reform, their focus should be on real ways to improve medical treatment and reduce its cost. Like encouraging patients to talk to their doctors about end-of-life care.
This is the period in a patient’s life when treatment is most expensive — when sophisticated life-prolonging measures are employed on behalf of a gravely ill person usually without medical personnel knowing if that would be the patient’s preference.
That’s why it is important for patients to review the medical what-ifs with their physician. Nowhere does discussing advance directives with a doctor involve a government “death panel,” but that’s the falsehood circulated by Republican Sarah Palin and others. Even Rep. John Boehner, now speaker of the House, said in 2009, “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia if enacted into law.”
Click here to read the full article.
EDITOR: We have little apparent hesitancy to send our youths into harms way in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we are terrified of discussing our own end-of-life issues with our doctors, lest somehow we involuntarily be deprived of some wretched last moments.
