Bite Me

I am sick to death of hearing about “death panels”. I wish someone would put either me or Sarah Palin out my misery. She’s taken one of the most sacred trusts anyone of us hold, that to care for a loved-one when they can’t care for themselves, and perverted it into nothing less than a blatant political tool. For someone who has experienced end-of-life counseling more than once, it makes me nauseous to see what has been a part of quality health care since professional, trained doctors have existed singled out and labeled a “death panel”.

If you’re lucky, you will have a doctor or a panel of doctors assemble to tell you or those responsible for your care the truth that you may not want to hear but need to know. How does one make a decision without knowing the facts? The options? The probabilities?

That’s what end-of-life care has always been, and it continues to be one of the most important components of health care. Withdrawing care is never easy, but withdrawing care without adequate information is unconscionable.

I’ve never had to do that and hope I’m never faced with that situation.

I doubt that doctors will cease the practice, whether they’re paid for it or not. It’s part of being a doctor. Or a good one, at least. Most private insurance would pay for it.

When Daddy died a little over two years ago, the team of doctors that was treating him assembled to talk to us about the grim prospects and what our options were. They provided information and described what can only be called cascading organ failure: his liver had failed, causing his kidneys to fail, causing his blood to thin, causing his heart to require medication to function. His eyes were bleeding and he was hemorrhaging under the skin all over his body. He could not be stabilized to the degree required for a liver transplant, even if one were available.

They gave us all the God-awful truth, but we made the decisions. The hard ones. The ones we didn’t want to make.

That is what end-of-life counseling is, and also what Sarah Palin is calling a “death panel”. Such rhetoric is ingenuous at best and appalling in general. It ignores the simple but obvious truth that end-of-life care is called that for a reason. It seeks to politicize what is often the hardest thing someone ever has to do. It cheapens the grief of those who have made hard decisions after getting the information they need to make those decisions.

Life and death should never be political footballs.

Mrs. Palin apparently doesn’t realize this. She created the concept of “death panels” out of whole cloth. And then got the media to report it. Never mind that not even the semblance of truth has come out of her mouth in the last several weeks.

No doubt, she will continue to contort, distort and generally misrepresent any proposals for health care reform. She will continue pandering to the extreme right wing of the Republican party rather than being sensible or even honest.

I think she might very well put herself out of her own misery (and mine, too) by imploding on a national stage. She’s made some pretty big claims that she can’t substantiate with real evidence, and the press is getting closer and closer to biting her Alaskan fanny real hard.

If only I could.