I was watching 60 Minutes on CNBC last night and one segment of the show was about how end of life decisions to stay alive at any cost is bankrupting Medicare.

These are some of the things doctors said: 75% of people die in hospitals. Elderly people with no hope of recovery or any hope of improved quality of life are being subjected to un-necessary tests and costly procedures--for what??
For the hospitals to make money, that's what. Full beds and testing mean money.
One woman said her mother was hospitalized as a No Code, but as she was dying, dozens of useless tests were done, subjecting her mother to needless torture.

I worked five and a half years on a floor where patients were hooked up to ventilators to stay alive. Once a patient has had a stroke or other damage and can't speak for themselves, family often have the attitude "Keep Mama or Papa alive, no matter what!"

I knew a woman whose family insisted she be kept alive, so she was put on a ventilator that breathed for her. She had a tube surgically implanted in her stomach for the enriched milk feedings that supplied calories. This formula causes diarrhea, so she lay unconcious, pooping on herself, and getting skin irritations on her backside, and developed bedsores. She had a Foley catheter in her bladder to drain urine into a bag, leading to constant urinary tract infections.
Imagine lying there not able to take a bath or shampoo your hair or brush your teeth, gurgling around the tube in your throat.

She got pneumonia several times and was dosed with IV antibiotics. Blood had to be drawn for tests every day--sometimes several times a day. She lay there inert and after nearly a year, her tissues started to ooze and smell--she was rotting--but still breathing via ventilator. This was a woman who after that massive stroke should have been allowed to pass away peacefully. The doctors knew that. One of them should have sat down with the family and the hospital ethics committee and talked frankly about doing the right thing. Being kept alive by artificial means was wrong wrong wrong--and very costly. No telling how much Medicare was billed for that year. This insanity was ignored because the clueless family insisted on it--and the hospital made money off this situation.

I know whereof I speak. I am a registered nurse who worked five and a half years on a ventilator unit and not one of the long term severely brain damaged patients on that unit came off the ventilator and was able to go home. If they got off, The only way they left the hospital was on funeral home stretcher. I was always dismayed by family members saying 'If we keep so and so alive, maybe a miraculous cure will be found.' That's magical thinking. That is not common sense. That is not reality.

A doctor on the 60 Minutes show said "Denial of death becomes a delusion." Another doctor said "We have to acknowledge we are mortal."
I myself have seen the horror of delusion and want nothing more than to be at home and kept comfortable when my time comes. Trust me--there are things worse than death. Being kept alive by artificial means is not life.

BTW, Jack Kevorkian has died--in a hospital. I'm disappointed with Jack. He should have suicided himself to put meaning into all that rhetoric of his. But as I suspected he was all talk, a psycho who could talk the talk, but was too chicken to follow his own mandates.

susil