Now This Is What a 'Death Panel' Looks Like

"It let's you make your own choice," says Barbara Aplin, shouldering an oxygen tank on her way to the lunch line here at the senior Community Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She is speaking not of her meal options in 2011 but of so-called "death panels," the more colloquial name for the new Medicare rule now paying doctors to counsel this seventy-six-year-old ("and three-quarters!") and her fellow senior citizens about end-of-life care. If you listen to the new fear merchants from the right, the rule pushes seniors to opt out of medical treatment that might prolong their lives. But take an afternoon to listen to the actual grandmas, and you get a much different kind of scare. If her children don't listen to an end-of-life plan, Aplin says, "I'll come back to haunt them."

Barb can rest easy, because that's the whole point of what the Sarah Palins and Tucker Carlsons of the world call "death panels" but what Medicare billing will now call "voluntary advance care planning": Seniors makes up their minds in a conversation with a doctor — a conversation that the two-dozen seniors and several doctors we spoke with said was happening anyway. No medical compensation for creating an "advanced directive." No added outcome required. No mention to Medicare (i.e. "the government") of what the voluntary conversation's result even was. Just a payment, once per year per patient, to a doctor who spends some time with a patient on the subject of death.

What's getting Fox News's granny panties in a twist comes down to a new billing code — "voluntary" instead of "v66.7" — that the Obama administration added back in to Medicare regulation on New Year's Day after dropping it from the rather contentious Section 1233 of the health-care bill. But we couldn't find a single elderly American on Medicare who was against the provision.

"Death panels," now that they're going down in a slightly different way, don't strike those a bit closer to actual death as particularly deadly — and certainly not as anything new....

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/death-panels-are-real-4718193?src=rss

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