Speakeasy forum: Welcome to Universal Health Care and Death Panels

Panels seem administrative entities. This is about medical practitioners (doctors) doing their work.

Kees

and what they won't. Can you think of a better definition of deciding who will live and who will die?

Pay for an expensive pill or shot or procedure or label it experimental and not covered.

Diana

Diana, I find it hard to believe that insurance companies order doctors to withhold food and water. If such a thing were to come about with Obamacare, I have a wish. I wish the government would allow me to pay in advance for a lethal dose of morphine, to be administered if they ever decided to end my life that way. I'd even pay enough money in advance for them to turn a big profit for the administration of the dose. I believe that dying from a morphine overdose would be much, much faster as well as much, much less painful than slowly dying of thirst.

But that's not a Right recognized in Law. Indeed it is opposed by most Conservatives on Religious grounds of one sort or another.

Would you prefer lying in bed, unresponsive for months or years, and then dying, or would you prefer to leave in 33 hours. None of us can know the hell that comatose unresponsive patients go through. Some of the very very few people who have awakened from comas, months or even years later, have reported terrible prolonged pain, and a wish to die.

British Columbia (in Canada) has just legalized the Right to Die. It involves previous legal instruction signed and Notarized, and a video taped statement I believe. It has to be made when the person is in their right mind, and probably is best if it is repeated over a period of weeks.

So, do you support that? If so, how liberal of you.

Rob

on the other side, making sure that you came out of it, and got moving again. It's a tough job which passes
unacknowledged. While recognizing the wretchedness of your situation during that period, now that you're back, are you glad you're back?

Rob

other people are making decisions about not allowing you to live because you take up space.

Yet another reason to not be overweight, the more you weigh, the more space you take up, the more doctors are out to murder you.

DO NOT under any circumstance visit your doctor?

so that you can deliver your self-satisfied little one liners.
First. There are no Death Panels, never have been, never will be so how can you assert that people in Health Care have a "job" killing people.
Second. Death Panels are a fiction invented by the Health Insurance Industry, which does have things which function like Death Panels but aren't called that. They're called the Risk Management Department, and Actuarial Departments, and The Board of Directors.
Third. I know of no country anywhere which would tolerate them. But apparently you believe that the Medical Profession in the United States is itching to get its hands on the Off Switch.

I just realized, you guys have a much more negative, hate filled view of the United States than the worst Anti-American I've ever met. You really believe that a country which chooses to improve Health Care, would do it by eliminating those it thinks it cannot afford to treat (or that you think it cannot afford to treat). You don't mind it happening in secret, silently in board rooms, but God forbid it should be done outside the Private Sector. Because the Private Sector does kill people premeditatedly, by denying Insurance coverage, by cancelling insurance already paid for for years. Kellogg Brown and Root electrocuted soldiers in Iraq through shoddy electrical work in the barracks it constructed and nobody did anything about that. That's dereliction on the part of the Bush and later the Obama Administrations. But it's in the Private Sector, so it's OK.

I'm glad I don't have to live with the extraordinary mental gymnastics those of you purveying this malarkey must have to go through.

Oh, there I go again, thinking that you're actually thinking about this stuff rather than just retelling the lies you've been fed. This is a truly dreadful reflection on the state of political discourse in the US, that you lie, first to yourselves, and then to everybody else. Dreadful.
Have a nice time while Mitt Romney loots the Treasury again.

Rob

I didn't read about that in the original story. Did you?

Kees

Death is physical term, and not clearly defined moreover. For example, for somebody to be a donor for organ transplant, the operational definition is '2 minutes without brain activity'. Then they start cutting.

Murder is a juridical term, and only a jury (in the USA) can determine if it is. There's the difference between homicide and manslaugter for example. And, of course, it can be an accident or misjudgement or a unhappy incident or - in the subject of this thread - a correct medical action to let somebody die in stead of starting or continuing a hopeless treatment.

What makes you talk of murder?

Kees

no matter what your condition? Do you want everyone to occupy a bed and medical resources and machines until they like Generalissimo Franco of Spain, begin to rot in his bed, because no one would say, There is no point in prolonging this there is nothing to preserve.

Or do you want decisions of Life and Death to be made by the Free Market, which means treatable poor and middle class people do not get the treatment they need and die prematurely, while the wealthy linger for years, like Sunny Von Bulow, forever comatose, forever consuming resources, never to live or die.

Have you ever worked, and I mean worked in a Hospital for decades and seen what happens there, and the quiet decisions which are made, not for the Hospital's benefit except in the case of Private Hospitals, but for the patient's and family's benefit. Doctors and Nurses and Technicians didn't get in the business to neglect people, or to erase them. They got in the business to make a difference in all the cases they could, and to develop the wisdom to know the difference between enabling a life, and merely prolonging it.

Death panels were a fiction made up by the Insurance Industry which went out and bankrolled what was falsely presented as a grass roots movement in order to avoid the system which runs Health Care in every industrialized country in the world except one: The US. The Insurance Industry thinks of its profitability and its shareholders first, and the patients last.

Your advocacy for Private Health Care is so naive in its assumption that no one will make a decision affecting your life. Somebody will, whether it's your Insurer cutting you off, or a Hospital Administrator saying "You've reached the end of your benefits and your finances, we'll be transferring you to a Public Hospital tomorrow." At which point you will become a ward of the State anyway. And a dependent of the masses whom you so clearly despise: "I wouldn't go into a Public Hospital, they're like Public Washrooms."

You can keep posting pre-written Tea Party talking points all you want, but they're untrue on their face, and contain a cruel and heartless subtext that is disturbing in a culture claiming to be a Democracy.

Rob, Who worked in Health Care for 30 Years.

Baiting aside, you seem so committed to your point of view that you don't read what I wrote with any attention, but merely to pick out something you can take a cheap shot at.
You posted while I was going to the loo, and while doing that I was thinking, "This is stupid. You can't make an argument in 5 paragraphs, and you're arguing with people who are wedded to the Shot from the Hip, the snarky mis-statement, the cheap irrational jab. The 6 word statement for effect if only to impress themselves."

Thank you for so readily confirming my thoughts while I was away for 2 minutes.

So, how many people have your political views killed James? Yours and Toni's. I'd put it in the millions between your views on Health Care (that it is a privilege for the wealthy, not a right for the whole population) and your vigorous support of Bush and his "foreign entanglements" and his neglect of Louisiana and Florida during Katrina.

Obviously as someone who has not been a Doctor, I have never been in the position to sit on one of those fictional panels you're so fond of. My ex- was, and they're not "Who can we terminate today?" nor are they "Who can we turf today to free up a bed?" They are discussions by all the doctors in the service (let's call it Gastro-Enterology) to plan the courses of treatment for all the patients in Hospital who are under their care. They are calm quiet discussions without any Insurance people around, but with a Hospital Administrator hovering with paperwork on bed availability and spread-sheets on earnings and expenses, about what the patient's prospects are, when they can be discharged home, do they need a Nursing Home because of age and lack of mobility, and who has passed beyond the point where treatment will achieve anything and should therefore be on palliative treatment either at home, or in a Hospice if one is available. Most terminal patients do prefer to die at home, though a lot will have a crisis which may lead to re-hospitalization and subsequent death there.

In the field I have had to make the decision of who to treat, and who I cannot save. (EMT, in case you've forgotten) and spent years afterwards wondering if I made all the right choices, but that's part of the business. The Ice Cold b*st*rds don't worry afterwards, but they're in it for the money, and leave the craft (it's not a profession) for a cushier berth with more money and more perqs (perquisites, benefits). You put up with them, and they generally clump together like dustballs under the furniture. You pray you're not teamed up with one when you're on shift.

Death Panels Don't EXIST. So how in trying to explain that can I reply to "Why defend those who do" when nobody is doing what you claim they do. Not even the Conservatively-biased Daily Mail claims there are death panels. It talks about the Liverpool Protocol which is about ending suffering where recovery is impossible and agony is likely to result from further life support.

Of course having an understanding of the truth, the complexity and the reality of the issues makes taking cheap shots at people who are trying to get a glimmer of understanding out of you so much more difficult.

Rob

I do NOT believe that health insurance is a right just because somebody breathes.

SO...if someone has a heart attack/is involved in an accident and doesn't have any insurance...they should NOT get medical aid?

the liberals replayed that cheering over and over in order to support your belief that Republicans just want people to die and it turned out that the cheering was actually out of agreement that as Ron Paul said in his response that in a free society people make their own choices and take the risks that go along with it. And it was less than 10 people who actually cheered.....which hardly represents the Republican Party, Diana.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irx_QXsJiao

with paying higher insurance..........Unfortunately, not only do I NOT have a say so in the extra $1000 my hospital tacks onto my bill that goes to the insurance company or to me personally with the co-pay that comes out of my pocket, but I also know that even WITH Obamacare mandating everyone buys a product, the hospitals themselves will NEVER stop charging that extra grand and pocket that money as they do right now. That charge is hidden in 'administrative charges' on the bill....it's not anything that is an obvious charge so most people don't even realize they are paying it now and will continue to do so. Only a class-action lawsuit will uncover it and people will have recourse to get it either given back to each and every patient who has had to pay it over the years or can get the hospitals to finally stop the practice of grabbing this money just because they currently can.