Liberals drive me insane. I have a few in my family. They think the answer is less freedom for greedy, self-serving capitalists, more handouts and higher taxes. They're convinced that just around the corner is a utopian society driven by government mandates.
whoa buddy, you just jumped off the cliff calling me a pan-liberal! though, i am admittedly a big tree hugger
mother nature always wins folks, we gotta be good to her... anyway...
i think it's hard to practice EM w/o having a liberal HEART at the core... with a partially conservative BRAIN with which to make some decisions.
rationing of care is absolutely needed, but not based solely on age. few things p!$$ me off more than seeing a terminally ill, almost always onc, patient who is dying in front of me but has no idea that they have a terminal illness! next in line is a demented gomer w/o a DNR. over-riding non-dnr gomer is usually SOMEONE who is profiting from the patient's suffering, which again irks me to no end.
i think that there are enough medical, legal, and economic/stat type brains out there to come up with some better QOL measures... if you fall below certain cutoffs, only palliative treatments would be deemed appropriate and reimbursable. if you want more, you can pony up the cash. we can't keep hemorrhaging money to keep individuals w/ no characteristics of a human being alive indefinitely... i should calculate what a "grandma-gram" costs... basic labs, cxr, ct head, iv fluids, level 4-5 visit.
leading these changes need to be NH medical directors... with plans of care for their terminally ill patients. sending a patient with an unclear MS baseline to the ED for any and all MS changes is not really appropriate in many cases, is very expensive, and doesn't lead to any meaningful outcomes.
the fact that the EOL discussion visit reimbursement was struck down is really sad... even my supposedly educated family members were all up in arms that we were killing off old people. again, the "assessment" for rationing should be multifactorial... but age, as we all know, is a poor prognostic factor for just about anything.
signed,
glad she didn't have to do any grandma-grams or futile tonight, for once