this from SALON shows what Pat is talking about...


harryandlouise.org

A screen shot from the Harry and Louise "Get the Job Done" commercial.

Aug. 4, 2009 | Next year we'll spend $17 billion in Medicare dollars on an oxymoron: preventing inevitable death. So forget for a moment the plans coming out of Washington. Curing healthcare is not a question of Obama's blue pill or Obama's red pill. The answer may be no pill at all.

At the end of our long and increasingly longer lives, when we are terminally ill and in the last months of life, we must accept our bodies' decline, face our own mortality, gather our families and say goodbye. Say no to feeding tubes, ventilators, resuscitators, the isolation of ICU.

End-of-life care eats up 12 percent of U.S. healthcare dollars; next year, we'll spend $135 billion on it. That's not money spent getting well and extending life, that's money spent preventing and easing death in terminally ill patients. Indeed, 40 percent of Medicare dollars are spent in the last 30 days of life.


Where does the money go? Hospitals. Half of us die in hospitals, 20 percent of us in their ICU beds, which cost 10 times as much, on a daily basis, as hospice care. ICU costs $1,500 daily; on average, $10,900 the first day.

Don't blame hospitals or physicians. We check in, we ask to be saved. Doctors provide care; they're not supposed to cut off or limit care. Besides, they might get sued.

so Salon suggests we simply don't help the sick elderly....