Tuesday, September 22, 2015

For This, People are Signing Away Their Right to Medial Treatment?

   I'll delve in, then, and do a better job in a future night than what I do tonight, for I must hurry at the moment.
   The hospice program in America is not good. It is a scandal waiting for the media to catch on and notice. It takes two things to qualify for hospice: 1.) The attending physician and a hospice doctor both need to certify the person has only six months or less to live. 2.) The patient and family need to agree the patient will only receive palliative care. Look it up in the dictionary. Palliative care means you are are only given pain medication, but no effort is made to cure the cause of your pain.
   So, our hospice program is depriving people of medical attention. Some, it seems most surely, are being relegated to death though they otherwise would live. Is this conduct fit for a civilized nation?
   To make matters worse, the hospice workers traditionally are paid more money than other care givers. If you were to bring in someone to bath them and change their diapers, it would be less than what the hospice worker gets.
   Who pays the bill? Medicaid. I don't know if there are other payees, but I know Medicaid it one. Uncle Sam pays for this waste.
    I say waste, because often it is. Say, a person is in a nursing center and yet on hospice, what can the hospice worker offer? There is already someone there to change the diapers, bath the patient and prop a pillow under his head. There is a call button right at the patient's bed side, and he can call the nursing center workers for whatever the need. The hospice worker does little more than come in and say, "hello."
   For that, people are signing away their right to medical treatment -- sometimes, at the expense of their very lives?
   These are good salesmen, these hospice companies, that they have been able to talk so many of us into this.
 

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