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In response to
"If there is a health care townhall meeting around here, I think I'll find a civil service job application and C&P something about applying for the job"
by
zeitgeist
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You know, for a phrase that doesn't even exist in the bill, it sure does pop up a lot. In addition, we already have ethics panels and professional
Posted by
Trish (aka Trisha)
Aug 11 '09, 00:32
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review boards. They've been required by law since Medicare started in 1964. They lay down medical guidelines, have mortality reviews and debate the "what ifs" endlessly. They aren't run by the government either, they're conducted by individual hospitals, medical groups and the AMA.
So what do they discuss? Ok, suppose you have a male patient, age 94, with severe end stage COPD. He has a prolapsed disk in his spine. His family wants him to have surgery on it. Ethics review committee meets to discuss and decide that it's unreasonable to do this surgery on a patient who is likely to die during the procedure.
On the other hand, you have clerks at the commercial insurance companies denying things like bone marrow transplants on 40 year old breast cancer patients. They're denied as being "experimental" even though the government and the AMA both ruled that they were not experimental and helped (to the point of a cure) 75% of patients receiving them. There is your death panel-they keep denying pre certification hoping the patient will die before they have to approve it. You'd be shocked to see how often this kind of thing happens.
So then you have a 40 year old woman dying, leaving kids behind, she was curable a year before and the family is devastated. The insurance company responds to any complaints or questions with, "we didn't tell her she couldn't do the procedure, we just said we wouldn't pay for it." Then the final kick in the gut comes when the family consults a lawyer to sue the company for wrongful death and they find out that managed care plans are exempt from that kind of action.
God, you people need to open your eyes. It's not the government having trouble administering Medicare and Medicaid that is the problem. The bad guy in this story is the mega company who plays life and death games with you in order to make a higher profit.
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