A true story, with changes made to protect privacy. An 89-year-old man with dementia, a heart condition, and other serious medical conditions fell in his Arizona apartment and broke his hip. His children, wanting the best possible care, arranged for him to be air-lifted to New York. There, the orthopaedic surgeon advised them that the chance of their father surviving hip surgery was very low, but he would do as the family wished. The man’s three children could not agree. Two would have avoided the surgery, but a third felt very strongly that everything that could be done for the father should be done. The other siblings, out of guilt and respect for the third, acceded. The surgery took place, and the father spent three days in the ICU before his heart gave out.
Here’s the terrible and hard-hearted question I pose: If the costs of this procedure and hospitalization had not been covered by Medicare, would the man’s children have proceeded along the chosen path? I am guessing not. I don’t know the total bill incurred, but it was certainly in the range of tens of thousands of dollars.
In the US, we don’t have a good societal process for making these decisions. In the United Kingdom, though, they do, as reported by Bob Wachter in a recent blog post. Here are some excerpts:
[D]uring my six months on sabbatical in London, when I asked British physicians or hospital administrators who have spent time in the US about their main impression of our healthcare system, I nearly always heard some version of, “You people don’t know how to say no to anything.”
In the UK, they have built an organization that makes these tough decisions: the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). I was lucky enough to spend several hours with its leaders last week in the organization’s London headquarters. NICE is awesome, not just for what it does, but for what its existence says about the maturity of the British political system when it comes to healthcare.
I asked Sir Michael [Sir Michael Rawlins, NICE’s founding chairman] what it was about the culture of the British people and the NHS that allowed NICE to function, when America has such problems saying, and accepting, a forthright “no.”
“The man on the street gets it,” he replied. “They know that there is a finite amount of money. And politicians get it as well — they know that someone is going to have to make these tough decisions, and they’d rather it be us than them.”
Imagine that.
Bob concludes:
Decisions over setting limits are invariably wrenching, but our failure to create a transparent way to make these decisions just means that rationing occurs implicitly and haphazardly.
Ultimately, silly season will end, our society will come to grips with the need to choose, and we will begin looking for a method of making these thorny decisions. When that day comes, it’s nice to know that we have a model to learn from.
Paul Levy is the former President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center in Boston. For the past five years he blogged about his experiences in an online journal, Running a Hospital. He now writes as an advocate for patient-centered care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement at Not Running a Hospital.
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I’m retired after 46 years experience in acute care hospitals. I started before
any medicare/medicaid and very few hospitals outside of teaching hospitals
had ICUs.
There are several elephants in the room:
1. EMTALA is the first big elephant–EVERY hospital has unpaid, unrecoverable costs–even small single community hospitals with no ER.
EMTALA requires every hospital that gets ANY federal funds to treat ALL
emergency patients. We even take care of dialysis patients who are brought over by family when dialysis is direly needed–there is only paid
dialysis in Mexico. We also get trauma patients who are delivered by
Mexican ambulance/cab. The Mexican consulate refuses transfer back to
Mexico unless the patient can go in a cab. American ambulances/cabs are NOT allowed in Mexico. We also have to freely treat Mexicans from train jumping accidents, local shootings/stabbings because unless they under arrest they will not be paid for, so they are rarely under arrest.
2. All covered patients (except wealthy foreigners) do not pay their own
bills (medicare, medicaid, private insurance, incarcerated persons, vets,etc.)
They pay some sort of co-pay/co-insurance(except medicaid.) In my county
on the Tex/Mex border, 5000 babies are delivered yearly mostly to Mexicans
who are here illegally(never deported) or women in labor who cross in a taxi
to have their babies here. All illegal newborns are citizens so all hospitals
apply for SS numbers and then get reimbursed months later by medicaid for
only the newborn’s care. This also happens in all large costal cities. The new U.S. citizen babies also qualify for SSI and SNAP. Don’t even ask if
the patient is in some vegetative state–if the family won’t sign papers at the
consulate to accept financial responsibility in Mexico, we are stuck (baby or
adult.)
3. Families of medicaid patients always want everything done for their
family member, even if they are terminal, have a living will, or just one of
one family member wants everything done. Likewise medicare Hispanic
patients and their families. Families and doctors can appeal to every hos-
pital’s medical ethic commitee. All hospitals are required to have them,
to provide information on request and to respond when requested to do so.
Additional notes: My county has a population of 450,000 population with
four hospitals and 80% Hispanic population. In my 35 years here, we’ve
had two organ donors from Mexican-Americans. In my four county border
area we have 1,000,000+ population 80%plus Hispanic population and we
can’t even maintain our own blood bank needs in the counties with 12
hospitals–only two less than 200 beds.
So you can see that answers to questions about solving health care costs
are multi-dimensional and basically unaffordrable under even slightly reduced circumstances.
Just for everyone’s information: Fed Gov rules require all hospital to enquire
of everyone about living wills and all hospitals are required to have state-
appropriate forms available to everyone.
EVERONE should discuss end-of-life care under whatever circumstances
with parents, siblings, and adult children. Elderly parents don’t always die
first.
Gentlemen,
The discussion to date regarding healthcare pricing has been excellent, but it represents one half of the conversation. The other half is the 10,000lb elephant that everyone wants to ignore.
Deep seated emotions, especially fear, are the most hard to change. Death for many is their greatest fear.
In our society death is the ultimate ending. It is the worst, and coincidentally last, event we endure. Even for those with “faith”, death is an event that is tremendously feared and avoided.
Right, who wants to die? No one of course, but is death truely the worst event in life? No. Ask any man that has endured poverty, torture or forced captivity their impressions of death.
There is no dignity in spending millions of dollars for a few months of life. Even if you can pay this fee out of pocket, what does that say to the man whose life is cut short because they can’t afford care above the norm?
Given the choice between 3 months of extended life or passing that money to something greater, I would choose the later. However, I am healthy now and I can’t speak to my state of mind when confronted with death.
Where does the conversation about how we approach death occur? Typically in the last moments of our life. I remember my Father in his 50’s wanting to talk to us about him not being around any more. We all turned the other way. We didn’t want to hear of this! Just shut-up dad.
Ok, I have rambled enough on an emotional topic.
Using big government to control prices? Consumer protection laws? 🙂
Steve
Work well in Japan and most other OECD countries. Those are usually prices negotiated by the providers with the state.
Steve
Many physicians are not on the payroll. Medical devices are very expensive. At present, a hospital bills for everything, even if their docs are employed. On a global budget, people then aim to work less for the same amount of money. What we do at my hospital then, is to incentivize docs to do enough cases, but that leads back to the same problem.
Steve
As much as I would love to see this solved tomorrow on a national level I have set my goals much lower.
If the attorney general of any State(s) would apply the usery or current consumer protection laws we could accomplish the end result pretty quick and possibly without the need for new legislation.
That and a positive judgement in State CA v Multiplan(PHCS) & Sutter Health could also put an end to the PPO BS real quick
150% of Medicare, guaranteed for all my patients…..count me in!
To Nate Ogden —
I know that some bloggers consider you a pain in posterior, and sometimes I do too…..but your post this morning about the repulsive prices posted by hospitals for not-so-major surgeries , and the almost-as-repulsive prices paid by some PPO insurers, was terrific!
All prior disagreements are profoundly forgiven! at least by me.
What if we had a President who actually understood health care price gouging?
He or she would go on camera, hold up a bloated hospital bill, and put a cigarette lighter to it.
He would add a comment on the salaries paid to administrators, doctors, and RN’s at the hospital which sent the bill.
He or she would then announce that no hospital bill can exceed 150% of Medicare.
Any bill larger than that could be ignored by insurers and patients as illegal price gouging.
I grant you that after the visceral pleasure this would bring to us policy wonks,
there would be some tough consequences.
Expensive hospitals in Boston, New York, LA, etc might start layoffs.
Some hospital bonds would go into default.
We would have to confront the fact that as a nation, we have propped up hospital employment and propped up the construction industry mainly through price gouging. (see Michael Mandel)
The president who spilled the beans in this way would certainly get no contributions from the medical industrial complex.
But this is a one term hero!!!!
Bob Hertz, The Health Care Crusade
“Unfortunately, true costing of medical care lacks standardization and consistency. As allocation of admin, plant, personnel etc. gets better, maybe someday we can see true costs.”
If payers, especially CMS, are going to treat hospitals as heavily regulated utilities, it could require allocation of indirect costs to individual clinical departments to be done in a consistent manner whereas right now, everyone does it somewhat differently. Regulators, at least within a state, require consistent cost allocation approaches for electric and gas utilities. There is no reason why hospitals couldn’t be required to do it in a consistent manner as well.
An efficiently run hospital should be able to receive a reimbursement rate sufficient to cover its costs, including capital costs and a reasonable profit / surplus even if they’re non-profit entities. Doctors are in the best position to determine what care is and isn’t appropriate given society’s limited resources. The rest of us need to back them up with safe harbor protection from lawsuits if they follow evidence based guidelines where they exist. We, especially the elderly, also need to execute a living will or advance directive and the information should be stored on an electronic registry so it’s available to doctors and hospitals when needed. If I were a patient facing an end of life situation, I would like to get the care that I want and not get the care that I don’t want and ensure that my family members know just what those preferences are.
Price controls don’t work, see Greece and the article I posted on the collapse of their pharmacies. We have price contols on Milk and other staples and they don’t lead to efficient markets. Great way for politicians to extract money but not so good for the public.
Wow, Nate! Remind me again, why are we opposed to price controls, like Maryland has in place? Or are we not opposed?
That’s why there’s a “heart center” on every corner. A small amount of the money from unnecessary stenting is going to the docs, but the hospitals that collect the bulk of the payments are raking it in hand over fist.
As I said above: overcompensation does TRIGGER procedures that involve costly hospitalizations and device use.
That’s arguable (I believe I read estimates of about 3%, which still is substantial money) but overcompensation does TRIGGER procedures that involve costly hospitalizations and device use.
As much as the discussion over economics and rationing is important for us to have in this country, I hope I’m not the only one who is concerned about the poor patient who probably spent his last days either unconscious (if he’s lucky) or uncomfortable in an unpleasant setting with a tube down his nose or mouth and his extremities restrained. And his family also didn’t have a good experience, with children squabbling over how best to care for their father. Family relationships are often complicated – it’s not good for patients or their families for long-standing conflict and guilt to be brought into life and death decision-making. This wouldn’t be a good outcome if the surgery didn’t have any cost associated with it – in the end, it did not benefit the patient and that’s the tragedy.
Agree that physician surgical fees do not contribute significantly to costs during the last year of life. But diagnostic and treatment procedures do (along with drugs and equipment). The same downward pressure needs to be applied to these that has already been applied to physicians’ fees.
Although not directly related to the original posting here, which to my interpretation is where the responsibility sits for determining appropriate utilization of limited resources, Nate is right on the money with the last post. Unfortunately, true costing of medical care lacks standardization and consistency. As allocation of admin, plant, personnel etc. gets better, maybe someday we can see true costs.
From the perspective of the provider, you betcha that a cost + 50% would be acceptable. What we are really looking at is good old cost-shifting. Charge-masters are nothing but numbers, no one pays this except the rare (and unfortunate) self-pay who is taken advantage of. Audit programs like Nate discussed are great, but few and far between.
Personally I would love to have cost+50% (or 25% or 10%) from all payers including Medicaid and self-pay. As a matter of fact (back to the physician compensation discussion) the fairest way to pay providers might be a time-based activity driven costing mechanism. The fact that a carpal tunnel procedure gets reimbursed more than an aneurysm repair is preposterous when taking into account procedural time, on call, bedside care etc. My point being no one really knows what many of the things we do really ‘costs’.
cost of inpatient care doesn’t really matter either, that’s not the problem, its billed charges of inpatient or any hospital care.
Problem with Hospital charges is Administrator/CEO hubris, thinking they can get away with charging what they do, and our system that has allowed it.
Two recent examples;
Outpatient Endoscopic polypectomy
Billed Charges $20,512.09
PPO Allowed $11,987.00 42% “discount” most people would look at that number and think they got a great deal.
Medicare Allowable $879.11
Luckily this client has a plan that limits UCR to hospitals cost plus a 12% markup. We paid them $1,205.82
According to the hospital it cost them $1,076.62 to deliver this care. I would have no problem paying them this amount plus 50%. What goes to make ujp that $1,076 is meaningless, the problem with our system is we are billed $20,000 and most plan pay $12,000.
Scoliosis Surgery
Hospital billed $307,604.80
PPO Allowed $246,083.84
Medicare Allowable $70,449.74
Again this client did our audit program so we paid $120,844.86.
When the cost to the consumer has no relation to the cost of the provider to deliver the service any discussions of providers cost are meaningless. If we reduced provider cost 10% does anyone think they would reduce their charge master 10%? Even if they did reduce their charge master 10% their billed fees are still 3-4 times out of line.
We just got a 20 day ICU bill in and I wish it was 100K. Billed charges for the third admit in a month, $653,770.99. Total claims on this person over 1 million. He was admited to a hospital, transfered to a prestegious hospital to have a valve put in, non FDA approved use, picked up an infection and was readmitted to the first hospital where they treated then infectiona nd replaced the non FDA approved valve that didn’t work with an apporved one that did. Now they are looking to the healthplan and the 60 co-workers to reimburse them. What did they possibly do that cost them anywhere close to 1,000,000 in 30 days?
rbaer, southern
Without reopening the baseless physician reimbursement differential argument, physician fees are NOT the main driver of costs for inpatient care….by a long shot. While decreasing surgeon reimbursement might drop utilization in the short-term, the cost drivers remain devices, drugs and days (length of stay).
For example, complex ruptured aortic aneurysm repair with endograft , my reimbursement about $1000…compared to device: $25000, 10-20 days hospital stay with ICU care $80-100k…now of course this is all bundled into DRG, but with complexities still drives actual cost to payer to $20-30k range minimum.
global budgets and public insurers and health all look great on paper, this is how they turn out once implemented though;
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-10/greek-crisis-has-pharmacists-pleading-for-aspirin-as-drug-supply-dries-up.html
For all the faults with our system at least we can delivery asprin effectivly
Exactly! The problem isn’t fee for service, it’s the distortions in our FFS schedule that we refuse to correct.
It’s simply that the current fee schedule favors procedures/surgery – doctors as well as hospitals earn quite well.
Make e.g. back surgery paid roughly as well as an office visit with a surgeon (some adjustment for intensity/risk of care and expertise is needed), and all that unnecessary back surgery will go away. That does not mean that you won’t be able to find a surgeon to treat your clearly needed cauda equina syndrome, or appedicitis, for that matter.
A great share of systemic medical problems would disappear by making reasonable and gradual adjustments to the medicare fee schedule. This problem by the way exists in Germany too, they also have money making procedures that are felt to be overutilized.
Your comments take us right back to the difficulty of having a complex and graded fee schedule.
The hospitals who do high-priced procedures probably make a lot of money.
ICU beds probably make a lot of money.
My own little goal has been to challenge the graded fee schedule. According to Joseph White in Competing Solutions, the Germans controlled hospital costs by paying flat per diems. If the nation’s hospitals exceeded the budget toward the end of a fiscal year, all reimbursements were reduced to 10% or 20% of normal.
At some point America will get real about cost control and gouge some sacred cows. Not sure when, though.
Bob –
I don’t have any clinical experience either. I’m a recently retired finance guy who covered the managed care insurers, drug retailers and PBM’s as part of my responsibilities.
In a recent Brookings Institution primer on the premium support model for Medicare, it stated that approximately 25% of Medicare’s costs are for care in the last year of life. I note that we often can’t tell ahead of time that a particular patient will die within a year of getting care, but end of life care, much of which is in fact wasteful, futile or otherwise inappropriate, is a big deal.
For hospitals, the most profitable parts of inpatient care are surgical procedures and cancer treatment. They don’t make much if any money on trauma, psychiatric care, OBGYN and low acuity medical (as opposed to surgical) cases. If there weren’t as many inappropriate procedures being done, the hospital wouldn’t have to hire or contract with as many surgeons, it wouldn’t need as many operating rooms and ICU beds, it wouldn’t need as many OR nurses and techs, or it could handle more patients for whom the procedures really were necessary and appropriate without expanding capacity at huge capital cost.
I don’t know about the VA but I doubt that many non-VA hospitals have lots of highly skilled and well paid personnel just standing around drawing a salary waiting for patients to come in. As for the very expensive drugs, if they’re not cost-effective based on QALY metrics or some other appropriate standard, we shouldn’t pay for them at all or we at least shouldn’t pay any more than we pay for less costly established treatments.
Where does the $30 million come from? Will that go up or down next year? Will it be like the military and get cut if you don’t spend it? Who gets to hold the money, the CEO or the Chief of Staff? How much will be allowed for Profit? Who pays for care out of your home area? What about the cocaine addict on dialysis? What about all the discretionary care like schoolo health and disability money? Who gets to say no?
I appreciate the comments by Barry and Paul. I have run an insurance agency but I certainly have never run a hospital or a clinic, so I may in fact have idealized global budgets.
Barry’s post does lead me to ask the following question:
Other than the use of overpriced drugs, why is any particular patient more expensive than another?
My father was tremendously weak in his last month in the hospital, and needed a lot of nurses— but they were already on the payroll at the VA.
The 89 year old in Paul’s example needed hip surgery, which is labor-intensive — but if the surgeons and assistants are already on the payroll, why would he be an expensive patient?
Where I am going with this is a long-time suspicion I have had that if we controlled the prices of drugs with no substitutes, we could give hospitals a flat per diem and not worry about them running out of money at the end of the year.
Any potential for cost control in Medicare has been sabotaged by having a graded fee schedule that is easy to manipulate. (See George Halvorson’s
1996 book Strong Medicine for some pungent descriptions of upcoding.)
I have wanted to be the analyst to say that the emporer has no clothes in terms of what makes an expensive patient. (once we control drug costs)
I certainly welcome any corrections though because I have no clinical experience.
Bob,
Thanks for your suggestion, but . . . .
I have talked to people in Canada and other countries with nationalized systems and annual budgets, and the same issue arises. Although the details vary, they also cite an sad lack of end-of-life planning within families, and between patients and providers.
In my experience in the US, having seen providers both on global budgets and fee-for-service arrangements, the same issues arise.
Bob –
What you say sounds sensible enough to me. The problem, though, is that too many people want what they want when they want it either for themselves or their loved ones and they expect someone else to pay for it. They don’t want to hear about limited resources or the need for them to pay more in taxes. This is why I’m glad to hear about recent proposed changes that direct doctors to build the wise stewardship of society’s limited resources into their practice patterns. Sometimes they just need to say that there’s nothing more we can do aside from keep you or your family member comfortable.
With respect to global budgets, I appreciate their conceptual appeal but it’s not so easy to estimate costs a year in advance especially in areas with a growing population. Also, a few very expensive cases can wreak havoc on even the most carefully developed budget. At the very least, every hospital would need to have to have significant financial reserves to carry it through a difficult year. What happens if they burn through their annual budget by November 30th or December 15th? Would patients not get care and employees not get paid until January 1st of the following year? If it were easy to estimate costs well in advance, there would be a lot less resistance to capitation.
I think that the discussion is rushing by me, but just for s—ts and giggles let me go back to my point.
In a system with global budgets the 89 year old and their relatives do not pay anything other than their taxes.
Nor does the 20 year old.
If resources are short, the doctors at the hospital decides who gets surgery first.
My point is not that this produces perfect health care. As noted in the comments about older Britons dying, it absolutely does not produce perfect health care.
But it produces a health system that the nation can afford.
People over 85 have had a good long life. History will think we are a little nuts if we measure our health system by how long people live past 85.
@Nate: Clearly you did not read my comment completely through. The 89 year old would receive treatment if there was nobody higher priority left to treat first. So if they are dying it is not because they money, but because someone else needed treatment more. In the current system the 89 year old received treatment, because they could file a medicare claim. Chances are in the same hospital on the same day someone under 65 died because they did not have medical insurance or the cash to pay for it. Is that the system your are advocating for? If so, you are in luck because that is the system you have in the US.
You would prefer to tell a rich person who has the money they are not allowed to have the surgery? Sorry sir we know you can afford to pay for your operation but that is unfair so your going to have to die without it so a poorer person doesn’t feel discriminated against.
Oh and poorer people that also needed minor services we can no longer provide those to you becuase the money we would have made off that rich person’s surgery subsidized yoru care, now that we lost that revenue your care will not be provided either.
Good job Bill, you just killed a handful of people but they all died feeling equal.
That said, I would not really pay much head to UK physicians, since they come from a medical system where people older than 70 are routinely allowed to die from conditions that everywhere else in the world are considered easily treatable with a very high survival rate. Never vacation in the UK if you are over 70. Even if you have money, they have virtually no private doctors or medical facilities to treat you, so if you have a medical emergency you will be allowed to die. My step mother who is a Doctor who has worked in embassies thoughout the world has told me that 100% of the patients transfered to the UK from here care have died. One time she even flew with a baby being transfered back from Indonesia. With in 20 minutes of her landing the UK the managed to F*@# up and kill the baby. While it strictly and antedotal observation, I would say the UK has the worst medical system on the planet.
I really would not want to live in a country were a person’s right to healthcare is measure by the size of his wallet. So a 89 year old from a rich family get a the surgery, while the 89 year old from a poor family does not? Human life should be valued higher than the value of money. That does not mean of course you do everything for everyone. I just means you somehow remove money from the equation when determining what is done with the limited health care facilities and personel available. Those with the likelihood of greater potential benefit from the same resources should receive priority. So if you have the doctors standing around doing nothing, then they should be operating on the 89 year old. However, if you have a 20 year old with equal chance of success, they should treat him/her first.
Sadly, I know my views are opposite of a majority of Americans and even a fairly large minority of Canadians, but that is what I believe.
This is exactly why everyone needs an advanced directive. The father should have designated one of his children (or someone else) to make decisions for him – that’s right; one person who is closest to him. I bet it wouldn’t be the one insisting on care. When I suggest this to some people, they balk at designating only one person, thinking it’s better to have it be a “shared burden”. Nothing is further from the truth, as this case shows.
Fanilies will buy snake oil to sustain life. Most patients will not pay for medical care unless they feel rotten.
Senator Grassley knows that LTACs are selling snake oil to families that also lube the cash registers for hospitals such as Levy’s former place.
Paul Levy is an earnest advocate of sensible patient care.
However, he misses the solution to the issue of end-of-life hospital care.
Which is this — stop paying hospitals on a fee for service basis, and start paying them with global budgets.
Levy is caught up (understandably given his career) in the classic Medicare and Blue Cross model. The hospital estimates its costs for ICU care and surgery on each patient. This is a mish-mash of overhead recovery, nursing time, amortized construction costs, etc, etc.
The hospital is then paid $20,000 for this patient, and $15,000 for another patient, and so on.
There is another way!
Give the hospital $30 million on January 1st, but pay no claims whatsoever.
Who among us would then know or care whether an 89-year old gets surgery ahead of or behind a 69-year old? Who among us knows or cares how many incidents our local fire department had last year at homes with wood
stoves? It does not matter to us, because we pay the fire department with a global budget and not user fees!
(read the wonderful Canadian Robert Evans for further discussions.)
I know that even with global budgets, there will be occasions when painful decisions must be made about individual patients. A Stage IV cancer patient who needs $500,000 in drugs to stay alive for six months will require some very tough debates.
However, the 89 year old needing hip surgery is not in that category,
Even now, we could have the very old get their surgery at VA hospitals. I have spent a lot of time visiting relatives at the Minneapolis VA hospital, and it has all kinds of empty beds and underused staff. In that case, the 89-year old’s care is already paid for in the VA’s global budget.
The end of life ‘dilemma’ is caused by over-reliance on user fees.
Bob Hertz, The Health Care Crusade
I guess to clarify, if one waits long enough to present with an emergent condition (ie hip fracture) to a federally supported (Medicare/caid) hospital, EMTALA makes it illegal to deny care due to immigration or payer status, hence, everyone can get care (like I noted IF they can get to it).
While nothing prevents a lawsuit from being placed, the requirement for medical tort includes negligence,and/or significant deviation from care standard which then must result in an outcome (harm, disability, emotion P&S etc.) that is other than expected from the disease process. End-of-life care for terminal conditions rarely results in successful malpractice claims if the patient dies.
Where are you writing from that no one is denied care if they can get to it?
When a doctor and every standard says further care is pointless how does that prevent the attorney from disagreeing from the pointy end of a multi million dollar lawsuit?
The question of payment for ‘the man on the street’ has never had to be asked in this country, nor will it ever likely need to be asked. Even in countries with socialized medicine, there is no need to ask the question, it’s either paid for or not. In this country, no one is denied care if they can get to it.
The real culpable party is the health care providers (ie docs) who fail to take the lead in deciding for our patients what is appropriate or not under terminal or difficult circumstances. We are under no obligation to provide care that unjustly taxes the system. The emphasis in that statement depends on appropriately defining ‘unjust’, a scientific and moral decision based on risks, outcomes and the knowledge that not everyone needs to die with a tube down their throat or an incision on their belly and that resources are critically limited. I think the question to ask the ‘man on the street’ is “Do you want your physician to be honest, guiding and caring when making challenging decisions even if it means a comfortable dignified death?”
““The man on the street gets it,” he replied.”
Very ivory tower responce. Why not ask the actual man on the street if he agrees. I personally read a couple hundred articles last year that would disagree. Sounds just like Obama telling us all we need to sacrafice then goes off to his Alice in Wonderland themed party that cost millions.
Those that have been affected by NICE decisions are not quietly and happily accepting it.
It is very sad any time we come across situations like this. I agree with Lowell in that medical care providers have a very hard job and when it comes to medical care there are very tough choices to make. Great article!
At some point we have to start making decisions based on facts and logic more than just sheer emotion. I applaud you for bringing this up. We are all so worried that other people might find us heartless or even cruel when it comes to decisions that may, at most, extend life for a matter of days. At some point we have to say, “We just can’t justify the expenditure for such a small return”
Americans think health care grows on trees…just like money I guess. It’s not hard (as a clinician) to know when to stop, but the majority of families in my experience have no idea of when it’s time to let go of their loved ones.