Health Affairs Blog-Fact or Fiction Advance Care Planning in Health Reform

by Chris Fleming

Patients with serious or advanced illnesses would be given more control over their care by language in health reform legislation passed by three House committees that would pay physicians, nurse practitioners, and other providers for counseling Medicare beneficiaries about advance planning for future care decisions.

That was the unanimous opinion expressed by three respected geriatricians at a August 20 conference intended to clarify several issues at the heart of the current health reform debate. The conference, Fact vs. Fiction: Key Issues in Health Reform, was sponsored by Health Affairs. The participants in the panel dealing with end of life issues were Christine Cassel, MD, President, American Board of Internal Medicine; Diane E. Meier, MD, Director, Center to Advance Palliative Care, Mount Sinai School of Medicine; and Jerald Winakur, MD, of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center and author of “What Are We Going To Do With Dad?,” a Health Affairs 2005 Narrative Matters essay.

Read More

AMNews: Sept. 2, 2009. Bioethicists fight myths over rationing, end-of-life care ... American Medical News

A new bioethics group speaks out on whether proposed health system reforms would violate patients' rights to late-life medical care.

Read More

Nevada ruling may compound end-of-life care decisions

By Amy Lynn Sorrel, AMNews staff. Sept. 1, 2008. A recent Nevada Supreme Court ruling may open the door for physicians' medical judgment to be questioned in end-of-life care decisions and make their role in such scenarios more difficult, some experts said.

Ethics panel may back universal coverage, ponders access as a "moral imperative"

By Kevin B. O'Reilly, AMNews staff. Aug. 4, 2008

A panel appointed by President Bush that met in June appears set to endorse some form of societal obligation to provide health care access to all.

The meeting was part of the President's Council on Bioethics initiative examining the ethical underpinnings of approaches to reforming the nation's health system and covering the estimated 47 million uninsured Americans. A report is likely to be issued after the November election.

Assisted Suicide of Healthy 79-Year-Old Renews German Debate on Right to Die

By MARK LANDLER Published: July 3, 2008 A woman’s desire to avoid life in a nursing home forces a country to confront the thorny ethical issue and casts an assisted-suicide advocate as Germany’s Jack Kevorkian.

Life and Death: Helping Families On Big Questions

THE INFORMED PATIENT By LAURA LANDRO Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2008, page D1 In hospitals, medical-ethics teams are increasingly the arbiters of agonizing health decisions: helping parents and doctors plan care for a dying child, mediating among family members who disagree about removing a parent from life support, or steering patients in denial about a terminal illness toward end-of-life care. But as the number of hospitals with ethics consulting services has grown in recent years, so have questions about how qualified some of these professionals are to render life-and-death advice. The complex ethical issues arising from new life-prolonging medical technologies are throwing up new challenges. And hospitals face potential legal liability if patients and families feel they haven't been properly counseled or provided with all the information they need to make decisions. In addition to the Wall Street Journal print edition, the complete article is available at: http://online.wsj.com/