Health care death squads missconceptions

Imagine Grandma’s surprise as she sniffles and coughs up her only defense with a sore throat, “It’s only a cold.” The balding and gray haired heads, lowly mumbling and thumbing papers at the heavy gray desk, look up, and Grandma hears the final fatal words regarding her fate. A gray head states “Been sick six whole days, going on seven, just can’t shake it” A rubber stamp hits a form and Grandma is politely escorted out by the very tall hooded fellow with the elongated garden hedge pruner. Imagine that: Grandma, wrong place, wrong line, wrong forms and wrong fate. Imagine that.

We will all have to conjure that dark and impossible image from our imaginations, because that is the only place it could ever exist. It could never ever happen. It is a fake and imaginary problem. The “Death Squad” was born of a wild and dangerous misinterpretation. Rumours and misinterpretations have helped create the ultimate boogey man under the hospital bed that somehow prompts full grown adults to convince young children to hoist place cards that scream “Obama lied-so Grandma dies!”.

White House Spokesperson Robert Gibbs stated Thursdays, after yet another highly spirited town hall event, that “the White House needs to dispel misconceptions on what the bill is and what the bill isn’t” Right now, the legal and medical wording, that is the healthcare bill, seems to be a highly well intended and unfinished work that most people are reading either way too much or not enough into. We seem to have that old and persistent (especially in politics) old folk fable about the five blind men trying to describe what an elephant looks like. Misinterpretations are common, from our own justification of a yellow light turning red to what Manson heard when he listened to the Beatles White Album. And then of course there’s just pulling red herrings out of a hat and calling it a “Death Squad”.

There is not much fancy wording about Sec.1233, in the healthcare bill, and not much about squads flying through the windows of the elderly or pillows over the head, but a bit about what Medicare would cover for an optional meeting between a patient and their doctor. Advance care planning consultation would inform and advise seniors of their rights on power of attorney, living wills and optional hospice care, if requested by the patient. True the underlying theme is all about death, the opposite of life and health. We all have our own views on life and death and our own mortality. Death is the ultimate change, and most of us are just seeing the health care bill as yet another change. But the creation of a fake “Death Squad” to exploit our fears of change mutes the far more important and debatable points of the health care bill. This bill certainly needs clarification as well as debate, and not a dark distraction like a fake “Death Squad”. If anything, the entire notion of a “Death Squad”, says more about what it’s brainstorming creators think about life, death, wills and granny, than about what the future of our health can be.

But then again, in order to understand and accept change, we’ve got to believe in something.
 

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32412764/ns/politics-the_new_york_times/

open.salon.com/blog/lpsrocks/2009/07/29/health_care_living_wills_or_govt-mandated_death_squads