abortion = family planning
terrorism = man-made disaster
war on terror = overseas contingency operations
telling the truth = hate speech
giving away other people's money = compassion
death panel = ?
Printable View
abortion = family planning
terrorism = man-made disaster
war on terror = overseas contingency operations
telling the truth = hate speech
giving away other people's money = compassion
death panel = ?
Sorry dood.
1-5 actually exist...+/-10
Death Panels don't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DarrinS
Educating and giving a family their options.
Yeah, that is why i went with the closest possible thing to what Darrin thinks are death panels.Quote:
Originally Posted by TeyshaBlue
What's the definition of a pro life republican
fight like hell to tell women what to do with their bodies.. make them have kids.
and then gut every social program they will need because they consider poor babies are strealing their money..
You know whats funny? Now that the health care bill has passed, the injunction requests and disregarded state lawsuits failed. It should be painfully obvious that they were politically motivated with no intent on actually amounting to shit. Quite frankly now that its over the GOP is distancing itself from the topic.
Whats really funny is that now your throwing out a buzzword that you were spoonfed over 6 months ago. Quite frankly, its very obvious that you don't know shit about whats actually in the bill much less read it.
At some point people are going to wake up and realize that the GOP is great at politics and campaigning but are shitty at actual policy making.
Now this is not to say that the Democrats are paragons of policy but quite frankly the legacy of the last 30 years for the GOP have been cutting taxes and increased spending for the DoD.
The former is to garner votes and the latter is to garner campaign contributions.
The democrats make plenty of mistakes, Clinton's handling of the DoJ and banking regulations and Carter's energy policy immediately come to mind but at least every fucking decision they make is not made with nothing but reelection in mind.
How about "end of life planning"? And here is a liberal ready to do in Granny.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezr...ng_to_eut.html
Johnny Isakson [is] a Republican Senator from Georgia. He co-sponsored 2007's Medicare End-of-Life Planning Act.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rep. Johnny Isaksen
What a monster.Quote:
Originally Posted by Rep. Johnny Isaksen
me
your chances of ever getting laid?Quote:
Originally Posted by DarrinS
I'm going to start calling them "life panels" ... it makes as much sense.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FuzzyLumpkins
You should post this again after Nov. elections.
You should read the rest of this thread. You got fish-slapped.Quote:
Originally Posted by DarrinS
If you say so.Quote:
Originally Posted by Winehole23
...ooooh snaap! :lolQuote:
Originally Posted by Oh, Gee!!
http://static.politifact.com.s3.amaz...antsonfire.gifhttp://static.politifact.com.s3.amaz...antsonfire.gifhttp://static.politifact.com.s3.amaz...antsonfire.gifQuote:
Originally Posted by DarrinS
PolitiFact's Lie of the Year: 'Death panels'
Quote:
Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.
"Death panels."
The claim set political debate afire when it was made in August, raising issues from the role of government in health care to the bounds of acceptable political discussion. In a nod to the way technology has transformed politics, the statement wasn't made in an interview or a television ad. Sarah Palin posted it on her Facebook page.
Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, "Death panels? Really ?"
The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times , have chosen it as our inaugural "Lie of the Year."
Quote:
Related rulings:
Seniors and the disabled "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."Sarah Palin, Friday, August 7th, 2009.
--Pants on Fire level of untruth.
Does any other left leaning person hope that Palin is a part of 2012 GOP ticket?Quote:
Originally Posted by RandomGuy
But, as a Democrat, I must say:
By all means please keep bringing it up. :tu
It makes the job of convincing moderates that the GOP is full of nutjobs with little hold on reality all the more easier.
Also, please continue to pillory moderates within the GOP, marginalize them, and remove them from power.
Do everything you possibly can to give the reigns of the party to the most obvious theocrats.
Please, spend more time thinking of and talking about new catchphrases like "death panels" at the expense of actual policy solutions.
copyright © 2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
A new study tackles one of the hottest issues of the recent health care debate: planning end of life medical care. It found that a lot more people are outlining their wishes in advance than previously thought.
And, as NPR's Joanne Silberner reports, most get exactly what they ask for.
JOANNE SILBERNER: The discussion caught fire last July when some conservative Republicans pounced on a provision in the House of Representatives' health overhaul plan. The provision would have allowed Medicare to pay for office visits where patients just talked to their doctors about what kind of care they'd want if someday they couldn't express themselves.
The proposal did not go over well with conservative commentator Betsy McCaughey. She complained on former Senator Fred Thompson's radio show that the result would be having to tell old people...
Ms. BETSY MCCAUGHEY: How to end their life sooner, how to decline nutrition, how to decline being hydrated, how to go into hospice care.
SILBERNER: Democrats argued that the government would only encourage people to discuss their wishes. At the time of the debate, Maria Silveira was already in the midst of trying to figure out just what role advanced planning plays in the practice of medicine. Silveira, a doctor with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the University of Michigan, along with some other folks, analyze the records of about 3,800 people who recently died.
First, they looked at how often critical decisions were made when people were critically ill, decisions like whether a doctor should perform surgery. They tallied the number of people who were too sick to say yes or no on their own.
Dr. MARIA SILVEIRA (Department of Veterans Affairs, University of Michigan): Almost 30 percent of the elderly in the study overall needs someone to make a complex medical decision on their behalf before they die.
SILBERNER: Now, most people had either a written statement about what they wanted or they'd assign a person to decide for them. The numbers were high because of a law passed in 1990 that requires that hospitals inform adult patients about their options.
Silveira's next question was: Were people's wishes followed? Ninety-seven percent of the people who put down a preference for enough care to just keep them comfortable got it. Eighty-three percent who wanted limited care got what they wanted. Very few people who requested all care possible, just half of them got it, she says.
Dr. SILVEIRA: The disparity with all care possible, I think, can be explained by the fact that all care possible isn't always an option.
SILBERNER: For example, CPR won't save someone with multiple organ failure. And in many of the all care cases, family members called doctors off. The New England Journal of Medicine has just published Silveira's study. The information about how often someone other than the patient must make an end-of-life decision is useful, says geriatrician Muriel Gillick of Harvard Medical School. But she's not so sure about the value of filling out a form.
Dr. MURIEL GILLICK (Harvard Medical School): The kinds of legalistic advanced directives that people typically sign are rarely genuinely applicable in the many different situations that people find themselves in.
SILBERNER: She says better is a conversation with trusted doctors, the sort of thing the House bill would have encouraged but the provision was pulled when the debate got hot.
Study author Silveira remembers an elderly woman she treated. The woman's eight children argued for months about what to do while their mother laid dying in the intensive care unit.
Dr. SILVEIRA: Short of a miracle, nothing would have made this situation easy, you know, for the family. But had these documents been there, it would've been a little bit less difficult.
SILBERNER: Any indication of what the woman wanted would've been a help, she says.
Joanne Silberner, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Why This Wisconsin City Is The Best Place To Die
Sandra Colbert sits propped up in a hospital bed at Gundersen Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse, Wis., connected by tubes to oxygen and IV fluids. Doctors have told her she didn't have a heart attack. But it sure felt that way when she collapsed at the gym a few hours earlier. "It felt like my heart exploded," she says, then adds. "I thought I was going to die."
She's not going to die, the doctor reassured her. But now nurses are asking her to think about dying. Or, more specifically, they've asked her to fill out a living will.
It might seem almost rude to ask a woman who just a few hours ago had reason to fear she was about to die — but who now knows she's OK — to think about how she does want to die some day. Yet it's a routine question in this Midwestern city on the Mississippi River.
The specially trained nurse, in this case a woman named Laura Wiedman, will spend more than an hour with Colbert — and her husband Jim — and help them both think through the treatment they'd want at the end of life.
Respecting Choices
Wiedman takes out a 12-page document and goes through the questions: Who do you want to make health care decisions for you if you can't make your own? If you reach a point where it is reasonably certain you will not recover your ability to interact meaningfully with friends and family, do you want tube feedings, IV hydration, a respirator, CPR and antibiotics?
These are complicated questions. It's something that the Colberts — like most adults in this country — have put off. But after Sandra's scare today, and Jim's hospitalization with a head injury this summer after he fell off an electric bicycle, it's something they both know they need to do.
Sandra cries when she writes down that she wants each of her grandkids to speak at her funeral. But there's more laughter than tears. Sandra says she wants Pink Floyd's "Put Another Brick in the Wall" and Ricky Martin's "Livin' la Vida Loca" played at her funeral. Jim jokes that he'll write down in his advance directive which of his daughters really was his favorite — a family joke among the girls.
The Colberts complete the directives and the nurse summons witnesses to watch them sign. Then Wiedman enters them in the health system's computers.
Now, anytime a doctor in this large health system pulls up their records, their wishes for end-of-life care will be prominently displayed.
The result of all this attention is that nearly all adults who die in La Crosse, 96 percent of them, die with a completed advance directive. That's by far the highest rate in the country.
Enlarge Joseph Shapiro/NPRBud Hammes, the medical ethicist who started Respecting Choices, says "We believe that our patients deserve to have an opportunity at least to have these conversations."
Joseph Shapiro/NPRBud Hammes, the medical ethicist who started Respecting Choices, says "We believe that our patients deserve to have an opportunity at least to have these conversations."
But it's expensive to spend time with patients filling out living wills. Medicare doesn't reimburse for the time the hospital's nurses, chaplains and social workers do this. Bud Hammes, the medical ethicist who started the program, called Respecting Choices, says it costs the hospital system millions of dollars a year. "We just build it into the overhead of the organization. We believe it's part of good patient care. We believe that our patients deserve to have an opportunity at least to have these conversations."
And that's how La Crosse unexpectedly got in the middle of the national debate over health care and the so-called "death panels."
A New Standard Of Care
There's a proposal — it's in the health bill passed by the House of Representatives — that would pay for the kind of periodic and continued end-of-life discussions with patients that are routine in La Crosse. Gundersen Lutheran is pushing for it.
Hammes says claims that government-run panels would pressure sick people to die are bizarre exaggerations — and that the experience of this Wisconsin city proves it. "These are conversations that we have with our patients. They're not done in a secret room," Hammes says. "These are open conversations involving family members, pastors, attorneys. It's part of our community fabric now, it's part of how we deliver care."
One result of the way that care is delivered: At Gundersen Lutheran, less is spent on patients in the last two years of life than any other place in the country.
Choosing In Advance
The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care documents the vast difference in health care costs from one place in the country to another. At Gundersen Lutheran, the cost of care for someone in the last two years of life is about $18,000. The national average is close to $26,000. At one hospital in New York City, it's more than $75,000.
"When people see the low cost in La Crosse, there are assumptions about rationing care, about denying care, about limiting — that we limit care for our patients," says Hammes. But it's not that dying people in La Crosse are denied care, he says. It's that they've thought out their wishes in advance, so they get exactly the care they want. And often that means avoiding excessive and unwanted care.
When Hammes came to Gundersen Lutheran Health System as a clinical ethicist, he often found himself called in to help families who had suddenly found themselves in the middle of a health crisis. "When I asked these family members, 'what would your Dad want,' 'what would your Mom want,' 'what did they say to you previously?' The response was the same again and again and the response was, 'If I only knew.'"
Hammes realized the shortcoming of the common practice of handing patients a living will. People didn't fill them out. They gave up trying to figure out confusing issues like whether to withdraw a feeding tube — and when.
So Gundersen Lutheran started training its staff — as well as ministers, lawyers and others in the community — to help people understand — and make — those choices.
Hammes says the point is to help people make informed choices. Decisions made on the spur of the moment, in crisis, can lead to costly and unwanted care. If a patient's wishes aren't clear, the default choice of doctors and family is often to provide high levels of care — even when it's something unhelpful.
But sometimes, getting a patient to think through choices can mean the patient decides he or she does want the most expensive care.
Enlarge Joseph Shapiro / NPRHauser says he doesn't want to go on dialysis "to be tied to a stupid machine for 15 hours a week." But, because of advanced conversations with his doctor, he's prepared to be able to go on dialysis if he changes his mind.
Joseph Shapiro / NPRHauser says he doesn't want to go on dialysis "to be tied to a stupid machine for 15 hours a week." But, because of advanced conversations with his doctor, he's prepared to be able to go on dialysis if he changes his mind.
The Option To Change Your Mind
Joe Hauser, who used to run a TV repair shop, recently found out his kidneys are failing. His doctor told him he's going to need dialysis, soon.
"I don't want to go on dialysis," he says, one recent morning as he takes his medicines with a glass of water at his kitchen table in the nearby town of Onalaska. "I don't want to be tied to a stupid machine for 15 hours a week. My main thing is I don't want to be a burden on anybody. I figure I'd love to live to be 150 as long as I can do stuff myself without depending on somebody else to do it for me. But once I get to I can't do nothing, I'd just as soon croak."
Joe's wife, Janice, sits next to him and shakes her head. She wants her husband to go on dialysis.
"Maybe I shouldn't say that," says Janice, "but I'm being optimistic about it anyway."
"See, good old Ma," says Joe. "She would like to keep me around here as long as possible."
"Well he's right," his wife says with an affectionate laugh. "Who else would put my eye drops in?"
So with some prodding from Janice, Joe recently talked to a nurse at Gundersen Lutheran about what it means to go on dialysis. Joe worried that once he started on dialysis, he wouldn't be able to stop. That's not how it works, said co-director Linda Briggs, a nurse in the Respecting Choices program.
Then Briggs invited Joe and Janice to visit the dialysis center and to drop in on a support group meeting, so they can talk to other patients.
Joe hasn't taken up the nurse on that. He says he still doesn't want dialysis.
But then there's a surprise. He extends his left arm across the kitchen table. He wants to show what he calls his "buzzer." It's a spot at his wrist where you can feel the vibration from an artery and a vein that a surgeon has joined together.
It turns out that Joe Hauser's decided to be ready, if he changes his mind. And if he decides he wants dialysis, then the needle of the dialysis machine can slip right in to that spot — the fistula — that the surgeon has prepared at his wrist.
And that gets to the point of why doctors and patients keep talking about end-of-life care in La Crosse: because choices are complicated. Because people's feelings change about the treatment they want. And the best way to handle that is to know all your options, well in advance of a health care crisis.
Intrepid Reporter Faces, Survives 'Death Panel'
By Joseph Shapiro
I entered the windowless room in the basement of a Midwestern hospital and appeared before a government-sponsored "death panel."
http://media.npr.org/assets/blogs/he...ammes.jpg?s=12
Bud Hammes, the medical ethicist who started Respecting Choices. (Joseph Shapiro/NPR)
The woman in a pink coat over black slacks asked pointed questions about whether I'd want tube feedings or to be on a respirator.
OK, it wasn't really a "government death panel." You know from the flurry of controversy earlier this year that there's really no such thing.
But I did meet in that windowless room with Laura Kaufmann, a chaplain at Gundersen Lutheran Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She's part of the Respecting Choices program and she helped me fill out an advance care directive.
This is routine practice in La Crosse. Nearly every adult in La Crosse--96 percent of them--dies with a completed advance directive, by far the highest rate in the country. But the Mississippi River city's success helped set off this summer's fears about government rationing of health care at the end of life. Listen to my report about advance directives there on Monday's All Things Considered.
Kaufmann and I sat around a small, round table. She came with an 11-page "power of attorney for health-care document." Over the next hour, she helped me think through questions like who I'd want to be my "health-care agent" who would understand my wishes at the end of life and who could make decisions for me if I were no longer capable.
She helped me with the question that asks "if I reach a point where it is reasonably certain that I will not recover my ability to interact meaningfully with myself, my family, friends, and environment," would I want to stop treatments to keep me alive. The form lists several: "tube feedings, IV hydration, respirator/ventilator, CPR, and antibiotics."
It quickly becomes clear that these are complicated decisions. What does that mean, to "interact meaningfully," I ask Kaufmann. As someone who covers aging, and in my own family, I've met many people with dementia who don't know what year it is, or can't follow a conversation anymore. They've lost a lot. Yet they can still find enjoyment in the visit from a friend.
And what about those treatments to continue or forgo? I've got questions about all of them. I tell Kaufmann of my friend, the late Ed Roberts. He was a post-polio quadriplegic who, I've argued in the past, became one of the most important civil rights figures of the last half of the 20th century. Ed used a respirator and an iron lung to breathe, but for him they were just other things that helped him lead his life, like his wheelchair. Or, as Ed would say, the way I depend on my glasses. I also thought of a friend who died of Lou Gehrig's Disease, and who, after lots of research, decided that he wouldn't go on a respirator, a grim milestone for someone with that disease.
So it helps to be able to ask these questions of Kaufmann, who's specially trained to consider them. Still, I can see why someone might distrust this kind of help. People have their own prejudices about what's proper care at the end of life--even a trained facilitator.
That's not a problem I see with Kaufmann. She explains that she's trained to listen to my thinking and how I describe my values and experiences. She's a good listener. The things she can't answer become our "homework". The next step (if I lived in La Crosse, instead of being a visitor) would be for her to find people who could talk to me in greater depth about my questions--a doctor, a medical ethicist, a nurse or some other expert.
Kaufmann says the point of the Respecting Choices is to get people thinking about the treatments they'd want at the end of life, but long before there's a health crisis. That's the key, she explains, to getting good care and getting your wishes followed.
She says what we're doing in this room needs to be just the first of continued discussions I have about my wishes--because they can change with time, experience or as I face a health crisis. "I would say it's important to revisit it every five years," she says. "Your health will change. Your won desires may change. What we want in our 40s is different than where we are in our 60s and then in our 80s."
La Crosse's near-universal use of advance directives came with an epiphany by Bud Hammes, the medical ethicist who started Respecting Choices in La Crosse. Hammes saw that it wasn't enough to hand patients a living will. They wouldn't fill them out. They give up trying to figure out these confusing issues. So Hammes got Gundersen Lutheran to train its chaplains like Kauffman, as well as nurses, social workers--and ministers, lawyers and others in the community--to help people understand and make those choices.
But all this costs money. Medicare doesn't reimburse Gundersen Lutheran for the time its nurses, chaplains and social workers spend on this. That's where Congress came in. Members included provisions in the health care bills to reimburse health systems for the kind of periodic and continued end-of-life discussions with patients that are routine in La Crosse. That's what set off the alarms about death panels and rationing of care at the end-of-life. The Senate took the provision out of its bills. But there's a version in the bill that was passed by the House of Representatives.
Oooh me! Me!Quote:
Originally Posted by George Gervin's Afro
Mainly because Romney bores me to tears...
Pretty much.Quote:
Originally Posted by George Gervin's Afro
If the GOP primary is competitive, I would actively go out and vote in the GOP primary instead of the Democrat primary to vote for her. The Democrat primary will 99% not be competitive, should Barack Hussein choose to run again, an almost certainty.
Many would do the same.
Anarchist!:lolQuote:
Originally Posted by LnGrrrR
If our country is going to crap, I at least want to have a good time while we're at it!Quote:
Originally Posted by TeyshaBlue
Someone hand me my fiddle and a lighter!
As a conservative, I agree. Only when the neo-con nutbars have completely purged the GOP of moderate conservatives and thereby marginalizing themselves, can conservatism begin to find it's voice again.Quote:
Originally Posted by RandomGuy
"conservatism begin find it's voice again"
The lying, slandering, fear-and-hate-mongering VRWC is in full strength, has been for a couple decades. A total failure in accomplishing anything positive.
^^^^^..which pretty much describes this post. :lmao ^^^^^^Quote:
Originally Posted by boutons_deux
Quote:
Originally Posted by RandomGuy
ok
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/var/...ril_9_2010.jpg
HRC will turn 65 in 2012. 2016 might be too late.