Tag Archives: advance care planning

“Death Facilitators Being Sneaked in over Labor Day Weekend”

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Once again the administration is trying to push through by fiat — with a few new twists — what Congress and the American public have already rejected.

Not only is the government offering an incentive to physicians (and presumably the hospitals and clinics and nursing homes  that hire them) to have “end-of-life” conversations with their sickest patients, but there is question as to which other “qualified professionals” might be be paid to introduce end-of-life discussions to patients. Continue reading →

Government-subsidized end-of-life conversations . . . What could possibly go wrong with that?

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Thanks to Mark Levin for his plain-language critique last week of the proposed CMS payment codes for (endless) end-of-life conversations. Levin speaks for many elderly, sick and vulnerable patients and their families who are being pressured into “letting go,” and this even without government-paid end-of-life talks.

Thanks, also, to Right Scoop for posting the audio, so that it gets the attention it deserves. Continue reading →

Former White House health policy advisor: Get the public on board

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In case you missed it, this was Chris Dawe last year, shortly after he left the Obama administration, and before he joined Evolent Health — a consulting company founded by the Advisory Board and the Univ. of Pittsburgh Health Plan “to help health systems move towards providing value-based care.”  (Advisory Board, which consults for C-TAC, was founded by David Bradley, now Chairman of Atlantic Media.)

Here Dawe is addressing the Campaign to End Unwanted Medical Treatment (which is in fact a campaign to gin up the public to demand less life-saving treatment.  Talk about perverse.) Continue reading →

Distinction without a difference? Guidance from the NCBC

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Last month the National Catholic Bioethics Center posted an article that was meant to guide Catholic clinicians on what to do when a patient or proxy or government requests treatment that the clinician considers to be morally wrong [“Transfer of Care vs. Referral: A Crucial Moral Distinction”]

The subject is important and timely, and I looked forward to reading the piece, but unfortunately it misses the mark when it comes to issues where withholding/withdrawing treatment and palliative care would be involved. Continue reading →

Compassion & Choices is funding the American Society on Aging blog

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Just a quick nota bene that the current edition of Generations — the journal for the American Society on Aging (ASA) — is posted on ASA’s blog courtesy of funding from Compassion & Choices (the present incarnation of the old Hemlock Society) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

One of the articles is by AARP veteran and Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) co-founder Bill Novelli (“Advanced Illness Care: We Can Do Better“). Continue reading →