Over at the New America Foundation, blogger Joanne Kenen elaborates on how the House and Senate Finance bills can lead to providing better end-of-life care. As As Kenen points out, these proposals are all about giving people choices—including the parents of children who are seriously ill. Finally, these proposals would reduce health care costs by making sure that people who don’t want to die in an ICU don’t wind up there by default.
“After all the sound and fury of last August, we're pleasantly surprised that the right hasn't risen again with all sorts of horror stories about the resurrection, so to speak, of the "death panels." Maybe because all that fear-mongering was finally discredited. Maybe we are finally getting just a little bit smarter.
The inevitable focus on the politics of health reform, and the disproportionate amount of attention paid to the public plan, sometimes obscures the many ways that the House and the Senate health plans are ambitious. Not perfect. Ambitious. I've heard experts, people I like and respect, say the legislation does "nothing" to advance the cause of quality of end of life care in America. They are wrong. The House and Senate bill each contain measures that would advance that cause — not fix it completely, far from it, but they will take us important steps in the right direction. It's too soon to know which of these measures – if any — will survive a final melding of House and Senate legislation. But let's look at them here because, except for the end of life consults which got way too much of the wrong kind of attention, they haven't gotten adequate attention. In an accompanying guest post. Dr. Ira Byock, director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, talks about what these changes can mean for his patients and their families.