US Healthcare and Death Panels

As people got into a frenzy about the US govt pulling the plug on Grandma, WaPo posted a level-headed article about the issue. Some extracts:

A quarter of Medicare costs -- totaling $100 billion a year -- are incurred in the final year of patients' lives, and 40 percent of that in the last month.

The directives are power-of-attorney forms that protect physicians and family members against liability, and the hospital makes clear to its doctors that they are expected to follow them. Today, more than 90 percent of people in town have directives when they die, double the national average.

The reliance on directives has an impact on the type of care people receive: Gundersen patients spend 13.5 days on average in the hospital in their final two years of life, at an average cost of $18,000. That is in contrast with big-city hospitals such as the University of California at Los Angeles medical centers (31 days and $59,000), the University of Miami Hospital (39 days, $64,000) and New York University's Langone Medical Center (54 days, $66,000).

The discussions do not promote less aggressive care, he said: "We're not trying to talk them into anything. We're trying to understand their values and goals, and tell them what medical science can and can't do." But many people do settle on less care. "In our community," he said, "people don't want to die hooked up to machines."

So, runaway Medicare costs can be reigned in by simply informing people of their end-of-life choices and letting them draw up a power-of-attorney to state their preferences. Maybe that sounds Orwellian to Amerisheeple, but it's just sensible, fiscally-conservative, pro-personal-choice policy, IMO.