Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
We need to actually have the "death panel" provision added to health care reform. All it does is ensures that patients and doctors have talks about what kind of end of life care they want and doctors are payed for the consultations. Add tort reform to help keep doctors from being sued as much and you would see a drop in unneeded testing. Those two things can reduce unneeded or unwanted health spending.
Why 5% of Patients Create 50% of Health Care Costs
Quote:
These patients tend to be newborns with serious issues and the elderly, who are often quite ill. According to one study (Banarto, McClellan, Kagy and Garber, 2004), 30% of all Medicare expenditures are attributed to the 5% of beneficiaries that die each year, with 1/3 of that cost occurring in the last month of life. I know there are other studies out there that say slightly different things, but the reality is simple: we spend an incredible amount of money on that last year and month.
Quote:
It seems that no matter how much money you use during that last year/month, if the person is sick enough, the effort makes things worse. A lot of the money being spent is not only not helping, it is making that patient endure more bad experiences on a daily basis. The patient’s quality of life is being sacrificed by increasing the cost of death.
I know of a woman...very old friend of the family, was a co-worker of my mother's 40 years ago...who is in a persistent vegetative state and has been for years. Her son refuses to let her go because he's getting her SSDI as long as she's alive. (I don't know how that works.)
Her medical bills are probably in the million dollar-plus range every year, and he demands aggressive treatment of infections/medical emergencies. The doctors have told him there is basically no hope of his mother ever regaining consciousness and that there's no measurable brain activity. He doesn't care; he's not paying for it. The taxpayers are.
She should be let go, I think. It serves no purpose to keep her artificially alive. All they're doing is forcing a corpse's heart to beat and her lungs to function. That's all.
We need to actually have the "death panel" provision added to health care reform. All it does is ensures that patients and doctors have talks about what kind of end of life care they want and doctors are payed for the consultations. Add tort reform to help keep doctors from being sued as much and you would see a drop in unneeded testing. Those two things can reduce unneeded or unwanted health spending.
Actually, I know personally a nurse practitioner who was part of a team that worked years on making very complex medical diseases and choices easily understood by the average person. The doctor's visit to discuss these things with a patient and to give that person more knowledge to make an informed decision about their own care, would have been covered by Medicare until there was a "death panel" frenzy about it!
Quote:
The "death panel" myth, as I reported in a September 2009 article, traces to a hospital in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a small city on the banks of the Mississippi. Since the mid-1980s, Gundersen Lutheran hospital has been building a reputation as a national leader in end of life care -- encouraging local residents to develop "advance care directives" that give the hospital clear instructions in how aggressive to be in treating various end of life conditions. Today, more than 90 percent of the hospital's patients complete advance care directives, many of them years before they become seriously ill. Not surprisingly, the hospital relies more heavily than others on palliative care and spends 30 percent less than the national average on end of life medical treatment. As one admirer put it in a July 2009 blog post, "If Gundersen's approach was used to care for the approximately 4.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who die every year, Medicare could save more than $33 billion a year."
I know of a woman...very old friend of the family, was a co-worker of my mother's 40 years ago...who is in a persistent vegetative state and has been for years. Her son refuses to let her go because he's getting her SSDI as long as she's alive. (I don't know how that works.)
Her medical bills are probably in the million dollar-plus range every year, and he demands aggressive treatment of infections/medical emergencies. The doctors have told him there is basically no hope of his mother ever regaining consciousness and that there's no measurable brain activity. He doesn't care; he's not paying for it. The taxpayers are.
She should be let go, I think. It serves no purpose to keep her artificially alive. All they're doing is forcing a corpse's heart to beat and her lungs to function. That's all.
Very frustrating situation! This is a prime example of why Medicare is unsustainable!
Most men rarely ever go to a doctor as compared to visits by women.
Individual decision.
Medical care cannot be quantified as qualitative care is far more important. Several visits to a bad healthcare provider may be detrimental as over 100 k people a year die from medical errors.
Medicine is a blend of art and science. If you go to a differnt tech or doc every visit, the very real healing affect is lost. You then depend on the every caretaker reading your files and that the files have been transcribed correctly. Huge potential for medical erros right there.
Geriatric docs cannot be replaced by 30somethings who tell you, 'well your gettting old' as a substitute for actually showing some interest by listening to the patient.
To speak of quantified healthcare and random providers for an individual patient is to exponentially reduce the quality of healthcare as it becomes federally defined and controlled for the benefit of some at the detriment of all.
Obama demonstrated the dumbing down of healthcare when he gave his red pill, blue pill speech. In obamaworld if the red and blue pill are approved for the same indication and the blue pill is cheaper then that's what the feds/politically connected health panels should approve. This is not the way pharmaceuticals are prescribed due to to individual response to differnt drugs for the same indication. Generics are another issue where there may be dramatic differences in efficacy and adverse events.
The obamaworld approach to medicine may be fine for a third world country where people drink sewer water and there is a dearth of real doctors but it not acceptable for the USA.
The good ship HOPE is headed for the rocks under Obama and the dems that passed obamacare. The first to go will be the old and the young. Take heart, your duly elected representatives will be well cared for life thanks to the US taxpayer.
The drugs, known as immunosuppressives, or anti-rejection medication, allow the body to accept the transplanted organ at a cost of $17,000 year.
Quote:
To provide kidney patients a lifetime of dialysis treatments, which funnels them to part-time lives and leaves taxpayers with a $71,000 annual Medicare tab for each patient
On Valentine's Day 2009, Scott Crawford, 41 years old, received the break that he thought would save his life. A surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore removed his ailing heart and put in a healthy one.
Quote:
According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicare data, the government spent $2.1 million on his inpatient and outpatient care in 2009. That was the fifth costliest of all Medicare beneficiaries that year and the highest among those who died by that year's end. Medicare covered Mr. Crawford's costs through federal disability insurance.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
