Physicians will be given financial incentives to encourage elderly Medicare patients to enter end-of-life "counselling" ("Do you really want to burden your family with your condition?"). This is something that some physicians now do with seriously ill patients. My problem with this is when this discussion is brought up because the physician is going to get a financial kickback for doing so. My question would be: Am I having drugs and procedures withheld due to their expense, and being told how I am being a burden to my loved ones because it's for my own good, or because my physician is getting more money from the system for doing so? At what point will this start to corrupt some of those in the medical community to ignore their Hippocratic Oath? Such a slippery slope. - Brian
Obama can't pass laws -- so he rewrites the rules: The new era of governing by regulation
Charles Krauthammer Friday, December 31st 2010, 4:00 AM
Most people don't remember
Obamacare's notorious
Section 1233, mandating government payments for end-of-life counseling. It aroused so much anxiety as a possible first slippery step on the road to state-mandated late-life rationing that the Senate never included it in the final health care law.
Well, it's back - by administrative fiat. A month ago,
Medicare issued a regulation providing for end-of-life counseling during annual "wellness" visits. It was all nicely buried amid the simultaneous release of hundreds of new Medicare rules.
Rep.
Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., author of Section 1233, was delighted. "Mr. Blumenauer's office celebrated 'a quiet victory,' but urged supporters not to crow about it," reports The New York Times. Deathly quiet. In early November, his office sent an e-mail plea to supporters: "We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists . . . e-mails can too easily be forwarded." They had been lucky that "thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it. . . . The longer this (regulation) goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it."
READ MORE HERE--->
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