Re: Pissed Off, About What ,
Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2012 9:05 am
I'm "pissed off" about the gap between life as we imagine it and life as it is. What's especially saddening is to learn from painful experience, late in life, that things you had always believed to be true weren't. My recent (and present) severe illness, from which I'm still struggling to recover, has taught me much I didn't want to know.
The bills for my health care this year have been around a million dollars. I'm grateful for my insurance, but wonder if keeping me alive was worth it to anyone but me. I also wonder if I could get the care I've needed under Obamacare. Obamacare creates the IPAB (Independent Payment Authorization Board), a panel of 15 politically appointed non-doctors, who will decide which benefits will be available to which people, with an eye toward saving money.
Britain has the Liverpool Care Pathway (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elder ... octor.html), a protocol for killing hospital patients by denying them food or water. The official line is that this is intended to ease the passing of those with terminal illnesses, but now doctors can decide, without anyone's consent, to do this to any patients they deem, perhaps mistakenly, to be bad off. About 130,000 people died on LCP in Britain last year. I don't know if anything like LCP will happen here, but the possibility scares me, because I'd be one of the victims.
I hope someone tells me my fears are overblown and that I'm being foolish, but all that I know of human nature tells me that it would be too easy to rationalize compulsory euthanasia. Let me draw an analogy to myself. I had stenosis (hardening and narrowing) of my trachea - the tube which carries air to the lungs. Every doctor at the major medical center I live near told me nothing could be done short of total reconstruction of my throat in a series of risky and difficult surgeries. So I went to see the world-renowned otolaryngologist, Dr. Peak Woo, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC. He removed the stenosis in a simple outpatient surgery last Friday. Here's what I learned: the ignorance and vanity of most doctors will not let them admit that what they can't do can be done; that without an insurance system that would let me seek out an expert like Dr. Woo I'd be screwed. Will Obama's IPAB let me find (the very expensive) Dr. Woo, or will it save money by enforcing the "wisdom" of most doctors? When you're sick, these are no longer "political" issues, but matters of life and death.
The bills for my health care this year have been around a million dollars. I'm grateful for my insurance, but wonder if keeping me alive was worth it to anyone but me. I also wonder if I could get the care I've needed under Obamacare. Obamacare creates the IPAB (Independent Payment Authorization Board), a panel of 15 politically appointed non-doctors, who will decide which benefits will be available to which people, with an eye toward saving money.
Britain has the Liverpool Care Pathway (see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elder ... octor.html), a protocol for killing hospital patients by denying them food or water. The official line is that this is intended to ease the passing of those with terminal illnesses, but now doctors can decide, without anyone's consent, to do this to any patients they deem, perhaps mistakenly, to be bad off. About 130,000 people died on LCP in Britain last year. I don't know if anything like LCP will happen here, but the possibility scares me, because I'd be one of the victims.
I hope someone tells me my fears are overblown and that I'm being foolish, but all that I know of human nature tells me that it would be too easy to rationalize compulsory euthanasia. Let me draw an analogy to myself. I had stenosis (hardening and narrowing) of my trachea - the tube which carries air to the lungs. Every doctor at the major medical center I live near told me nothing could be done short of total reconstruction of my throat in a series of risky and difficult surgeries. So I went to see the world-renowned otolaryngologist, Dr. Peak Woo, at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC. He removed the stenosis in a simple outpatient surgery last Friday. Here's what I learned: the ignorance and vanity of most doctors will not let them admit that what they can't do can be done; that without an insurance system that would let me seek out an expert like Dr. Woo I'd be screwed. Will Obama's IPAB let me find (the very expensive) Dr. Woo, or will it save money by enforcing the "wisdom" of most doctors? When you're sick, these are no longer "political" issues, but matters of life and death.
