Headlines I Wish I Hadn’t Seen
ObamaCare Exchanges Will Cost $111 Billion More Than Predicted Just Last Year. No one knows why.
$323,000 was spent on a man with “do not resuscitate” and “desire for a natural death” orders — during his last 10 days of life. HT: Sarah Kliff
Here is the correct link for the “Attorney General Eric Holder…”
Texas has a number of cities that rank high on the obese list. Someone should do a study correlating the percentage of obese with the percentage of certain types of restaurants in certain cities.
Goodman, are you trying to depress us this morning???
Such a study as what you describe could help make the case for cities to put higher taxes on certain foods so as to discourage certain types of restaurants from operating there.
This is outrageous!
Look at it from the doctors’ point of view: The vast majority of cancer screening finds nothing (or results in a false positive). Why would a physician be as vigilant about a hypothetical as they are about care that is actually needed?
“$323,000 was spent on a man with ‘do not resuscitate’ and ‘desire for a natural death’ orders — during his last 10 days of life.”
This article was misleading… Medicare only actually paid $67,800 — not $323,000. The $323,658 bill was a fiction, not a real bill the hospital expected to actually be paid.
The author describes a sudden infection that went septic in an 88-year old, frail man with advanced dementia. There were numerous opportunities for a natural death.
The daughter said… “This was a man who gave me life. Who was I to summon his death?”
When the elderly man was first hospitalized, and doctors realized he would die without aggressive intervention (and probably die even with aggressive intervention) they should have sedated him and allowed him to die naturally. The ICU and a ventilator were obviously intended to prolong the life of a man in extremely poor health.
It may sound harsh, but if the daughter who authored this article were paying for her father’s final medical bill out of her inheritance (or her own money), she might have more eagerly made some tough decisions. For instance, was the last 8 or 9 miserable days of her father’s life worth $50,000? It’s a choice most people don’t worry about when their loved one’s bill is being paid for with OPM — other people’s money. But as a society, we need to have these discussions.
Would the overweight problem be after the adoption of the WHO standard or before it? Under pre-WHO standards the prevalence of overweight in NHANES III was 33.3% for men and 36.4% for women. Post-WHO the prevalence was 59.4% for men and 50.7% for women.
Change the cutoffs, end differentials by sex and age, and presto, one has an instant epidemic needing to be combated with wads of public funding.