Slaying The “Death Panel” Bull: Taking Control of Your End-of-Life Decisions

Posted on | April 13, 2011 | Comments Off on Slaying The “Death Panel” Bull: Taking Control of Your End-of-Life Decisions

Mike Magee

This Saturday, April 16, 2011 is National Healthcare Decisions Day – a day set aside to encourage families throughout America to discuss with each other how much care and what kind of care they would like as they approach the end of their lives.(1) Why advanced planning? Because there is a good chance that when the time arrives for each of us to make these decisions, we may lack the decision making capacity to do so. It makes sense to take a moment to let your loved ones know your preferences.

Why do we need a National Healthcare Decisions Day at all? One reason is we tend to procrastinate – especially when it comes to our own mortality. So we all can benefit from a little encouragement. But sadly, we now have the added obstacle of highly politicized organized resistance.

These are the individuals who invented the term “death panels”; who issued solemn warnings that sensitive confidential planning with your doctor could be “a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia”, and who then doubled-down with media voice box amplifications like “possible first slippery step on the road to state-mandated late-life rationing”.(2,3,4) Yikes!

(CONTINUE….)