Advance Care Planning Initiative Kills Trees Not People

The debate over whether advance care planning is actually another way to describe death panels is rearing its ugly head again since regulation started January 1^st. The few folks who are still fuzzy on exactly what the intent of the regulation is are claiming that it will cause some folks who are facing some tough decisions, such as whether or not to continue life-sustaining treatment, to just say the heck with it and have their caregivers pull the plug.

While that is not the case at all with this particular piece of legislation, what most people should be concerned with is how many trees are going to be killed by going forward with the initiative. Yes, I said trees will die and plenty of them, which will probably get the anti-tree huggers folks all riled up with their discourse on hippies and climate change weirdos, but that is a debate for another time.

The point I’m trying to make is that the real losers in any piece of historical legislation are always the trees. Just to start the process, you need bills, and bills are always written with the least amount of brevity because, let’s face it, everyone has an opinion as to what they want the bill to say and Senators and Representatives are no exception. Speaking of which, you don’t have one bill, you have a House bill and you have a Senate bill on the same subject. In the case of this proposed legislation, each of those initial bills counted out at over a thousand pages each.

Then you have the combined bill which finally came out to around 2700 plus pages, give or take a subsection. I’ve worked at law firms all my life, and I’ve seen one draft of a brief of say 30 pages get sometimes up to ten or more re-writes before it is filed with the court. If two or three attorneys are working on the case, each of them has to have a copy of the brief and subsequent drafts. Let’s just say that at the end of the day, it is no longer considered a brief.

But let’s get back to the end-of-life planning phase of the Health Care Reform Bill. To start the process, there are pamphlets to give out at doctors’ offices to inform patients of their rights. One can only imagine the hundreds of man hours it took to come up with just the right wording on that pamphlet and the re-writes to get it just so. Telling someone they have options when it comes to dying can be a tricky business. It’s not something you jot down on a cocktail napkin the night before at Joe’s bar and then go into work the next day and punch it up for your editor’s approval.

After perusing the pamphlet, a patient may make the decision to take advantage of their options, in which case, there are forms to fill out. Consider this. Just filling out the forms to become a patient at a doctor’s office entails filling out and reading about a dozen forms, so imagine the paperwork involved in deciding whether or not you want to continue living when it comes time to make that decision. It would be insensitive to offer less paperwork to allow someone to make a right-to-death decision than it does to visit say a proctologist would it not?

 The doctors who care for the patients have to fill out more paperwork to advise governmental authorities of their involvement with the plan, and, of course, insurance companies will want to be informed of what’s going on, considering the windfall they get if someone decides to cut short their drain on resources to keep them alive.

All of this paperwork should have the trees of the world shaking in their roots. With all the advanced technology we have these days, you still see multiple thousand-page plus bills sitting on legislators’ desks waiting to be read. And we’re not just talking health care, we’re talking about finance reform, DADT regulations being changed, etc. If you’ve been hospitalized lately, you know that it takes the equivalent of time from just after breakfast to the noon hour to sort through all the paperwork the hospital administrators load you down with upon arrival at their facility to make sure they will get their money before your departure. And when you do check out, assuming you didn’t check the end-of-life box on the aforementioned forms, there are inch-thick piles of yet more forms to sign before they wheelchair you out of there.

Next time you want to talk death, take a moment to remember the living things that are giving their lives every day for our propensity to change something for nothing more sometimes than a misspelled word. “The Heath Care Reform Act—Senate Version”…there goes another couple thousand acres of forest.

Senate Democrats Should be Sent to Reform School

In the wake of the systematic butchering of the Senate version of the health care reform bill almost single-handedly by Sen. Joe Lieberman (Dem/Ind/Rep/Lib-CN), it has been suggested that not only Lieberman, but all Democrats should be sent to Reform School to learn the meaning of the word reform.

Let’s review. According to several sources, including the latest census polls, approximately 47 million, or roughly 1 out of 3 Americans, are without health insurance in this country. That isn’t counting the folks who are underinsured. Healthcare reform is not an issue of “should it be accomplished?” It is an issue of “when will it be accomplished?”

The original intent of health care reform called for by President Obama would effectively accomplish three important things:

1. Make healthcare insurance coverage affordable to all;

2. Extend coverage to all regardless of pre-existing conditions and not allow denial of coverage for certain procedures; and

3. Improve the quality of health care for all through investing in updated technology and focusing on preventive care.

Sounds easy enough right? Just give those pesky insurance companies a little incentive to become a little more competitive in their premium pricing by offering a public health option that would allow all those uninsured folks who can’t afford the more expensive private health insurance premiums to buy into a government program, allow folks with existing medical conditions to be able to buy affordable health insurance, and allow coverage for more than just being sick, i.e. coverage for preventive healthcare screenings. Right. And therein squats the toad.

Insurance companies like making their huge profits year after year and sitting on their piles of money. They weren’t about to take this lying down, well at least, if they did take it lying down, they’d want to still be on top. So what did they do? Well, they took some of those profits and they gave them to charities all over the world to show what nice guys they are so that the government would get off their backs. Ha ha, just joking to see if you are still paying attention. Actually, they are using some of those profits to buy themselves some high-priced lobbyists, PR professionals, and attorneys to ensure (not insure) that no one, especially some poor out-of-work slob, will get the opportunity to actually afford the product they are selling, because, God forbid, he might get sick and need to file a claim. And you know what? It’s money well spent because it seems to be working!

With the help of most Democrats, the lobbyists are winning with their lies and their deceit. They are systematically making a mockery of our legislative process. And the bill passed by the House is but a mere memory in the wake of what has become a Senate bill that, if it were to be passed today, would:

1. Hand over millions of premium-paying customers to the very insurance companies originally targeted as being the culprits who put us in this mess in the first place, by making it mandatory for all Americans to carry health insurance coverage, whether they can afford it or not. And no guarantee that the premiums won’t rise and it won’t be business as usual once the bill is passed.

2. Allow coverage for pre-existing conditions; however, allowing the insurance companies to charge much higher premiums for high-risk policy holders, making it difficult for them to afford the policies and once again, forcing them to remain uninsured and come under the ire of the government for not carrying health insurance.

3. Not provide a government option, be it public option or a buy-in to Medicare at an earlier age for those who cannot afford private health insurance, which would, of course, force the insurance companies to become a little more competitive in their pricing.

What a deal huh?

But here’s a word of advice, don’t let it get to you. The more you worry about it, the sicker you’ll get, and as it stands now, since you started worrying about it before you sought help for worrying about it, you will not be able to file a claim for your stress-related illness as it will be deemed a pre-existing condition.

So I say that unless and until we send those Senators to reform school to toughen them up and get them some lessons in what reform really means, we will continue the flawed process of seeing any bill, no matter how impressive it once was, not only whittled down to mere inconsequence, but built back into a stronger pro-insurance company bill by those with the fattest wallets and the biggest mouths.