About Those "Death Panels"

It is amazing how many people are horrified at the concept of “death panels.” It is as if we visualize some futuristic event that puts us on automated gurneys, surrounded by lines of masked practitioners in white masks who give us a shot at age 79 ½, and “send us on.” Our health care system has spoiled so many of us. We are lulled into a false sense of immortality by frequent visits to the doctor, antibiotics for every sore throat, CAT scans for abdominal pain and heart catheterizations for dizzy spells.

In the current debate on health care reform, many people are extremely fearful that insurance coverage will be rationed. It is unthinkable that some government official in cahoots with a government doctor could and would decide who receives what kind of health care. This rationing of services has become the political football known as “death panels.” None of us are able to access a database on private insurance claim denials. Most of us will not find reading Medicare guidelines on a snowy Saturday night a priority. Some of us would find horror stories in the “utilitarian approach” or the “utilization reviews” of the insurance industry. People are dying every day because “death panels” already exist.

The general public does not know that a geriatric patient with dementia may not be admitted to a hospital even though screaming in agony and praying to die. There will be a very long wait in the ER, so that a medical evaluation can be performed based on Medicare guidelines. “Pain” is not a Medicare diagnosis and if hospital x-rays do not reveal a broken bone, the patient may easily be discharged back home with a Percocet or a shot of morphine, no matter how ungodly the screams may be and no matter what the internal cause of the screams. The ER diagnosis will be “Pain, etiology unknown.” Medicare may not even cover any of the cost. If a patient with extreme dementia cannot tell someone what is wrong, and there is not a test to give a select diagnosis, the patient goes back home. I know this because the person screaming in the ER was my mother.

Health reform will only increase the insane bureaucracy of this system. The political winner of health reformation is irrelevant.