Threads by NYer and me.
HHS Says “Units” Over 70 Will Receive “Comfort Care” Instead Of Actual Neurological Care
Those who have implied that the President’s health care law will establish “death panels,” have encountered excessive criticism. Yet, more and more information is being released identifying that rationing of care will in fact occur, and that it will be done by government bureaucracies.
For example, a phone call into The Mark Levin Show on WLS 890 from a Chicago neurosurgeon last month revealed that a Health and Human Services (HHS) document, associated with the Obama Administration’s federal health law, will inhibit patients over the age of 70 from receiving neurological care. Instead of receiving “advanced neurosurgical care,” “units,” (meaning patients), over 70 will receive care to make them “comfortable.” In order to provide the neurosurgical care, a physician would have to appeal to a “ethics committee” made up of administrators, not physicians, to determine if the services can be administered.
This document, not surprisingly, has not been presented to the public.
Listen to the call by clicking the link below:
Obamacare Rationing – A Phone Call From A Neurosurgeon
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The Unspoken Diagnosis: Old Age (NYT Barf Alert!)
Dr. Alexander K. Smith is a brave man.
It has taken physicians a very long time to accept the need to level with patients and their families when they have terminal illnesses and death is near — and we know that many times those kinds of honest, exploratory conversations still don’t take place.
Now Dr. Smith, a palliative care specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who also practices at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and two co-authors are urging another change, one they acknowledge would “radically alter” the way health care professionals communicate with their very old patients.
In a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, they suggested offering to discuss “overall prognosis,” doctorspeak for probable life expectancy and the likelihood of death, with patients who don’t have terminal illnesses. The researchers favor broaching the subject with anyone who has a life expectancy of less than 10 years or has reached age 85.
(Excerpt) Read more at newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com ...