A Reversal on End-of-Life Planning
The Obama administration will cut a new Medicare provision to compensate providers for discussing end-of-life care, according to the New York Times. This is an unfortunate reversal.
Too-often, doctors fail to have these discussions with their patients. This happens for many reasons including some physicians’ discomfort with the topic, their not wanting to diminish patients’ confidence in their healing powers, conflicts of interest (infusing chemotherapy is profitable; prescribing palliative home care is barely so, if at all) or simply being too busy to get around to the subject before a patient becomes critically ill and approaches death in an ICU setting. Most physicians need incentives to discuss palliative care options and end-of-life planning with patients in a thoughtful, not-rushed way.
The Medicare provision, which would have provided a small amount of compensation for doctors to spend time communicating with their patients about their preferences – whether they’d want to be kept alive on a ventilator with metastatic, refractory cancer, for example, or whether they’d want to be kept alive in a comatose state with a feeding tube for weeks or months or even years after suffering brain damage from low oxygen, might have helped some people get the kind of end-of-life care they’d choose, instead of what their doctors might give unthinkingly.
Again, I recommend that patients should be pro-active about their wishes. If your doctor doesn’t mention the topic, tell her what you want and document your wishes. Here’s a partial list of sites that provide related information on this subject:
MedlinePlus on Advanced Directives;
New York State: information on Health Care Proxy forms and DNR orders
Medicare on Preparing for Your Future Health Care Needs
Family Caregiver Alliance on End-of-Life Choices
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