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It's a nice lazy summer afternoon, you've just finished lunch and are getting ready to head out with some of your other retired buddies for a round of golf. There's a knock at the door and you go to see who it is. "Good afternoon sir, I'm with the Health Department of the U.S. Government." "Your on our list as being over 65 years of age and on Medicare." "We need to talk to you about how much longer you intend to live." As you stare in disbelief, he continues..." We are required by law to counsel you on your...

What happened to ObamaCare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health care nirvana: more coverage, less cost. But you can't fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes. President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats' health care plans, says the...

Obamacare dictates end of life counseling every five years (or more)... See for yourself: Here is the section dealing with end of life counseling for seniors. This section talks about possible life sustaining treatment. These orders, of course, will be "standardized and uniquely identifiable throughout the State." This life sustaining treatment will be "guided by a coalition of stakeholders includes representatives from emergency medical services, emergency department physicians or nurses, state long-term care association, state medical association, state surveyors, agency responsible for senior services, state department of health, state hospital association, home health association, state bar association, and state hospice...

Editor’s Note: Stephen Bloom is a Christian attorney with more than 20 years experience in private practice. He is a frequent media guest, speaker, and writer on Christianity and the law, a Lecturer in Management and Business at Messiah College, and a Consultant to the United Methodist Stewardship Foundation of Central Pennsylvania. He is a legal columnist for Good News Daily, former host of the "Practical Counsel - Christian Perspective" radio program, and founder of the Estate Planning Council of Cumberland County. Bloom has been actively involved in the leadership of numerous community and ministry organizations, including his church, where...

A Delaware woman has become the next Terri Schiavo as her parents engage in a massive legal and philosophical debate about whether to subject her to euthanasia. Richardson is a 23-year-old woman who overdosed on heroin in August 2006 while she was three months pregnant with a baby girl. Doctors kept Lauren on life support until she delivered her baby in February 2007. Shortly thereafter, her parents began a fight that is reminiscent of the battle over Terri's life and death. As in the Terri Schiavo case, physicians have been quick to label Lauren as having a persistent vegetative state...

This is the title of an article in the current issue of Forbes. It is written by John J. Parris: Jesuit Priest and Professor of Bioethics at Boston College. The article starts with a problem. In 1999 a patient was admitted with Lou Gehrig's disease. The patient indicated she should be kept alive until she could no longer enjoy her family. She eventually became unresponsive. Her daughter refused the hospital's wish to terminate life support. A lengthy (10 month) court battle ensued. The daughter opposed but eventually was faced with the hospital taking the position (Court approved) that the daughter...

Hundreds of hospice providers across the country are facing the catastrophic financial consequence of what would otherwise seem a positive development: their patients are living longer than expected. Over the last eight years, the refusal of patients to die according to actuarial schedules has led the federal government to demand that hospices exceeding reimbursement limits repay hundreds of millions of dollars to Medicare. The charges are assessed retrospectively, so in most cases the money has long since been spent on salaries, medicine and supplies. After absorbing huge assessments for several years, often by borrowing at high rates, a number of...

The state of Oregon legalized a form of assisted suicide in 1994, but its neighbor to the south, the nation's most populous state, has no such provision. Efforts in California to pass legislation allowing assisted suicide have failed five times over the past fifteen years. California has adopted liberal legislation on any number of controversial issues, but not this one. Why? Assisted suicide proposals have been thwarted by disability rights activists. The logic of the disability rights movement is easy to understand. Once a society adopts a right to die as a matter of policy, a duty to die cannot...

Marcelle Jones has thought a lot about how her life might end. She has been treated for a serious medical problem for several years, and while it has not gotten worse, eventually "it's going to get me," said Jones, 82. Long before she moved to Lakeland in 1990, Jones had joined the Hemlock Society - now known as Compassion and Choices - an organization that provides information about how terminally ill people can end their lives, either through passive means or, if they choose, by suicide. Lacking family and wanting to spare her friends the burden of caring for her,...

On a November day just before Thanksgiving in 2005, Joan Rademacher, a 72-year-old woman with breast cancer, sat at a kitchen table in Madison with her hospice nurse, drinking tea and discussing the progression of the disease. The bumpy, reddened skin that at first had been contained to Rademacher's chest had crept to her back and arms. It looked like a rash but was in fact the tumor spreading. "Are you in pain right now?" asked Cathy Sutter, the hospice nurse. • Post a comment "No, not physical pain, emotional pain." "I don't think you've ever said that," Sutter said....

Vitamin supplements taken by millions of people every day for their health could be increasing their risk of death a new Danish-led study suggests. The study is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The international research team reviewed the published evidence on beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin E, Vitamin C and selenium. The team was led by Dr Goran Bjelakovic, from Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark. These dietary supplements are marketed as antioxidants and people take them in the hope they will improve health and guard against diseases like cancer and heart disease by eliminating the free radicals...

J. R. was an auto mechanic of French Canadian descent with a perfectly square gap between his two front teeth and the slightly off-kilter face of a retired boxer. Soon after I met him on the surgical ward, after he had been found to have cancer, he developed a habit of planting himself in front of me whenever I got within 100 feet of his room, to spin stories about his life, wax poetic about his girlfriend, and offer free auto-repair advice. I thought we had caught the tumor in J. R.’s colon early, but in the operating room we...

Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a series of columns first posted on the Illinois Right to Life Committee's (IRLC) website [http://www.illinoisrighttolife.org/] written by Bill Beckman, IRLC's executive director. The RFFM.org re-posting of the column discusses research on "brain dead" and "almost dead" patients. This series warns readers about end of life issues and the need to monitor the care given to loved ones. The IRLC director also describes what readers can do to protect themselves from the looming culture of death which permeates the thinking of many medical facilities in our nation. The following was written by Bill...

The California Legislature has been on a one month hiatus after six months of session. I have often compared the legislative process to a roller coaster ride, and following that analogy, the first six months of session are sort of like the part of the roller coaster where the ride takes the riders higher and higher with the chain underneath. Everyone on the ride knows that the higher the ride goes, the wilder the ride will be when the car finally goes into free fall. This year the roller coaster ride had a couple of interesting dips, the largest being...

It was October 2003 when doctors at Newark's University Hospital declared Mary Stanford's 42-year-old daughter, Phyllis, "brain dead." "I was told there was no chance of her coming out of it," said Stanford, 67, who lives in the Iselin section of Woodbridge. Dealing with an official declaration of brain death for a loved-one can be gut-wrenching, especially if a family has to wait hours for the ruling. Now, the New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners wants to streamline the process by allowing just one physician to declare brain death. Currently, an attending physician's finding must be confirmed by another...

Can Ambien Wake Up PVS Patients? The Guardian gives credence to a case report concerning three patients purportedly diagnosed in PVS for more than three years who were "aroused transiently every morning after zolpidem," a sleeping pill. That would be Ambien. The report, by Clauss and Nel, of Royal Surrey County Hospital and of Family Practice of Pollack Park South Africa, was published in this month's issue of Neurorehabilitation. There are 26 million annual prescriptions for Ambien, most of which are probably not to patients in a persistent vegetative state. Recall that Ambien is oft reported to cause odd behavior...

WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who took a leading role in the Terry Schiavo case, said Sunday it taught him that Americans do not want the government involved in such end-of-life decisions. Frist, considered a presidential hopeful for 2008, defended his call for further examinations of the brain-damaged Florida woman during the last days of a bitter family feud over her treatment. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. The case became a rallying point for right-to-life advocates, an important segment of the Republican Party. It also drew interest from those supporting the right to refuse life-sustaining medical...

Just a few quotes, but go to the site to get the flavor (emphasis is mine): R. Alta Charo: At the heart of bioethics in a public setting, like a public policy commission in my mind, is political philosophy as opposed to moral philosophy. You could argue from here until Sunday about whether or not it’s right or wrong for me to go forward and have a child with disabilities, whether or not it’s right or wrong for me to tell the truth to my patient – any number of things that are questions of individual morality, but you haven’t...

June 23, 2005 Look to the Future: Preparing for Baby Boomer Dementia Epidemic INDIANAPOLIS — How can the U.S. health-care system and more specifically, primary care doctors - the physicians from whom older adults receive most of their care - prepare for the huge wave of dementia patients expected to engulf us in 2010, the year the baby boomers begin to reach 65? Researchers from the Indiana University School of Medicine, the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and the Indiana University Center for Aging Research begin to answer this difficult question in a study published in the July issue of the Journal...

Blurring the line between life and death, and between medical data and morality, her death signifies a disturbing turning point for American society. Terri Schiavo died on March 31, 2005, after lasting 13 days without food or water. Her life and death had a profound impact on the American psyche and brought to the forefront the unresolved debate regarding how we treat severely disabled people and who should be their surrogate decision-makers. There is reason to be disturbed by the role that physicians play in molding public opinion regarding end of life issues, because their expertise is generally in medicine...