Tag: Rationing

What discharges alive from hospice tell us

(cross posted at freeforall)

Paula Span recently wrote about hospice as a shield against unwanted medical treatments that provided the space for an elderly Medicare beneficiary to get better. The irony is that the family she writes about had to choose the option associated with imminent death to be able to take their mother home and allow her to receive competent care that her adult children could trust; eventually, she was discharged alive from hospice. Work that I did with colleagues at Duke shows that around 15% of Medicare beneficiaries who begin hospice are discharged alive (85% of Medicare beneficiaries choosing hospice used such care continuously until their death, an average of 50 days later; median 15 days, Group 1 below).

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Sen. Coburn: for unelected health boards before he was against them

Ezra Klein has an interview with Senator Tom Coburn that focuses on health care reform. Lots could be said about the interview, but I want to focus on what I see as the hypocrisy displayed by Sen. Coburn in his criticism of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) that will be created if the Affordable Care Act is implemented. In the interview with Klein, Sen. Coburn says:

The reason I object to IPAB is you’ve got someone between the patient and the physician, and that can never be in the best interest of the patient.

The most shocking thing to me about Sen. Coburn’s consistent demonization of IPAB as a “rationing board”  is the fact that a bill (Patients’ Choice Act) that he co-sponsored and introduced on May 20, 2009 contained two unelected boards (IPAB is also quite weak; another post). That means that key Republicans supported unelected health boards a full month before the first House committee reported out HR3200. I have written tons on this issue specifically, and about Sen. Coburn’s Patients’ Choice Act generally (here, here,  here, here,  here, here, here, here), including some favorable things. I guess I am just naive, but this level of hypocrisy still shocks me.

Below is a post I wrote in May 2011 that focused on Rep. Paul Ryan, another co-sponsor of the PCA; just insert Sen. Coburn’s name as you read; they have behaved similarly on this issue.

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