Of Dirty Underwear and 12-Gauge Shotguns

Facts in the current debates about health care have been as scarce as a politician not on the take from some Wall Street bank or mortgage company. Let’s start with a few.
In the last seven years, U.S. health insurance company premiums have gone up 87 percent. In the same period of time the ten top insurance companies increased their profits 428 percent. Over 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in this country have been caused by medical bills. Of those who have been bankrupted, 70 percent have had health insurance! It’s enough to convince you to go to your “death panel” and plead to go to the head of the line.

Nearing my eighth decade on this earth, one of my hopes is that I have inherited my dad’s genes. He lived to be over 99 and never had a serious medical problem except death. But I have now reached the average life span of Americans and two years less than citizens of every other civilized-industrialized nation on earth. I enjoy life and want to stick around, hoping that the Happy Reaper will escort me out late instead of having the Grim Reaper carry me out early, loaded with tubes and “juice.” But as my mother used to say: “That’s life!”
Tom Cooper, a doctor of urology who specializes in cancers of the urinary tract, probably has put the fear and confusion of our last months better than most: “None of us want our sons and daughters to clean our soiled underwear for months as we die — it’s a humiliating way to go — yet none of us want to step outside and put a 12-gauge into our mouths either.”

The stupid, silly, brain-dead discussion about death panels only emphasizes the possibility that Americans have the lowest IQ and are the most ignorant people in the civilized world while establishing the fact that we have the worst health care system among the civilized regions of the planet.
Man has been making death panel decisions (“pulling the plug on grandma”) since the cave man squeezed an infected puncture wound inflicted by a mastodon and an old Eskimo left the igloo to die in a snowbank on the tundra away from her family.

Death Panels Have Been Convening 24/7 for Centuries

People have been “triaging” people for centuries, sorting out those who may survive with proper treatment from those who have no chance of survival — and separating those who will survive without treatment. On the Civil War battlefield, death panels were found wherever there was a pile of amputated limbs outside of a tent. Or you could find them by listening for the cries of the wounded. Death panels meet day and night in hospitals and emergency rooms across the United States and on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Death panels meet every minute of every day in health insurance war rooms across the United States, determining what patients will be covered and what health problems and premium payers won’t be.

A death panel meets every time a decision is made on who gets a transplant. A death panel met when a health insurance company denied coverage to a woman with breast cancer because she had failed to reveal she had acne as a teenager. Death panels meet every time pre-existing conditions are used to determine if the person “deserves” coverage. Insurance company death panels meet every time premiums are increased way above the cost-of-living increase. Death panels meet whenever a patient is denied coverage when they have reached the limit of their policy. Actually a lot of death panels meet in employer offices when people are laid off or fired. How many ex-employees can afford COBRA coverage? A death panel meets every time a cancer patient gets an overdose to relieve pain and suffering.

I know I’m going to die some time. It may be this afternoon, or it may be in 2032 when I reach 100. The only people who are going to live forever are the white-haired, government-hating town hall screamers and yellers who are immortal because of Medicare treatments. Evidently, free-market Republicans don’t die. They just retire to a marble crypt that looks like a bank.

In that the so-called American health “system” puts patients at greater risk from medical and surgical errors than all the top systems in the world, we require more death panels than any other civilized country. We kill 20,000 a year because they don’t have health insurance. Hospitals and doctors kill 100,000 a year because they don’t keep things clean.Ten studies of medical performance comparing our care with the “socialized medicine” of Canada reveals our weaknesses. Of the ten studies of care given a broad range of patients suffering from a wide range of medical problems, five were favorable to Canada, only two favored the U.S. and three were basically tied. Canada spends one-half of what we do but we require more death panels!

Even Shakespeare Supported Death Panels!

In Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquy, Hamlet debates the same questions that families, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies face every minute of every hour about life and death (comments in parentheses are mine):

“To be or not to be: that is the question [To live or die, that is the question] / Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them: [Commit suicide] / To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause. [What happens after we die–if anything?] / Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” [We don’t know whether there is an afterlife or eternal nothing after we die or whether we will be reincarnated as an angel or a cockroach.]

Last year 2,426,264 people died in the U.S. Heart disease killed 631,636, cancer 559,888, stroke 137,119, respiratory diseases 124,583, accidents 121,599, flu 56,326, diabetes 72,449, Alzheimer’s 72,432 among the major causes. Our life expectancy was 77.7 years last year. About 80 percent of deaths occur in hospitals and nursing homes. No matter how hard we yell and scream at town halls about life and death, we are all going to die. My life is now at 77.6. I just hope now I make the average.

How many of the 2.5 million who died last year were discussed in death panels? Half? A fourth? Three-fourths? Look at the number of geezers dying from Alzheimer’s. Would 90 percent conducting death panels to discuss their case be too low? How about the 500,000 dying from cancer? With all the friends and acquaintances who have died from cancer and its ravages, how many died without having a death panel convened? We still lose 600,000 veterans a year to death. How many death panels have been organized in VA hospitals by families? How many death panels have been convened in the 30,000 hospitals and the 3,100 hospice and palliative units in this country?

Even Sarah Palin, before she got infected by the power virus and brain dead from eating too many fish loaded with mercury, supported the idea of death panels in a 2008 proclamation on Healthcare Decisions Day. She wrote: “To raise public awareness of the need to plan ahead for healthcare decisions, related to end of life care… and to encourage the specific use of advance directives to communicate these important healthcare decisions.” This statement simply proves that power corrupts.

A Little More History On Death Panels

Because death is everywhere (94 billion of the 100 billion humans who have lived on earth so far have died), societies around the world have been using death panels for many centuries. In B.C. China, communities supported “death houses” to care for the dying and to comfort the bereaved. For centuries the Maori tribes of New Zealand have the custom of convening death panels to give support to the families of the dying. The elders of East African tribes organized death panels to give practical and spiritual support to the dying and the families affected.
Until the 19th century, Western European and North American societies left the care of the dying to families and churches. Some hospice units have an interesting line in their protocols: “In the last 100 years, dying has increasingly been seen as a medical event, not as a milestone in the life and history of a family.”

Hospices were started in Europe to take care of pilgrims traveling to shrines seeking miracle cures. Many would die on the road from chronic and fatal illnesses. Most hospice facilities were supported by religious orders. I think it’s interesting that the first use of “by the clock” opiates was accomplished by hospice doctors. Before that, drugs were given only when the patient complained of severe pain. Now “by the clock” opiates keep the pain under control so the patient does not have to battle severe pain at intervals. It is now the standard practice in hospices and palliative care units.

Can Suffering Acute Pain Get You Into Heaven?

I don’t know of any other religion in the world besides Christianity that says severe pain has redemptive power — the more you can suffer the more points you get on the “Ascent Into Heaven” chart. I guess such a philosophy might hold down the number of death panels convened by evangelicals and Roman Catholics. Is this why town hall yellers and screamers raise so much hell at health care meetings? Is it because they want to feel severe pain so their “rapture” will be enhanced?

Here I go again, picking on the Roman Catholics and the Baptists. Let’s examine a few lines from A Catholic Guide To End-Of-Life Decisions (Yes, they have one):
“For those who have lost their faith in God, the suffering and helplessness of serious illness makes little sense… Suffering at times may be a profoundly distressing experience that raises deep and troubling questions about the meaning of life and even the nature of God. How can a merciful God allow us to experience the suffering of illness? It should be comforting to reflect on the fact that God Himself entered into human suffering through His Son who suffered and died so that we could overcome death… The suffering of illness and dying brings the Catholic a grace-filled opportunity to offer prayer for oneself, loved ones and for the whole human race. The Catholic, with a deep faith in Jesus Christ, may not be able to understand his suffering, but he knows he can offer it up as a powerful prayer.”

Actually these lines seem to emphasize that Christian and Catholic theology is centered on one huge eternal death panel. The more pain the more indulgences. The more pain the closer to God one becomes. Why should the amount of pain be a physical and faith test to get you into Heaven? It boggles the mind.

The cooked-up controversy about death panels is absolutely bizarre. I bet every white-haired geezer yelling his head off at a town hall health meeting has been involved with numerous end-of-life discussions. We have to begin to limit the obscene costs of the six-months twilight at the end of life. Why should we spend an average $46,000 for the last six months of life?
That’s an inconvenient truth. We are not enemies of grandma. We are not cruel. We are not like the lady watching TV stretched out on a sofa in a New Yorker cartoon who says to the EMTs bagging up her dead husband on the floor: “Hurry up with your investigation; he’s lying on the remote.”

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