How funny...how true...

This is a great post by Panda Bear MD

I see many incredibly old, incredibly sick, fantastically complicated patients who all present for some variation of being as old as dirt and sick as stink. Perhaps complicated is the wrong word. There’s nothing complicated about impending death. When you’re pushing 100 nothing is really standing between you and the Grim Reaper except he’s finishing his bagel and latte and he’ll get to you when he gets to you

The current system can not help but be ridiculously expensive because of the way it is structured. Nothing wili ever change, no matter how or to whom you shift the costs because

1.Patients are not encouraged or expected to take personal responsibility for their own health.

2. As every insurance scheme insulates the patient from the true cost of health care, there is no incentive for patients to make good economic decisions.

3. The legal environment makes it impossible for anyone in authority to exercise common sense. When I was younger, for example, drunks went to the drunk tank at the police station. Now they all come through the Emergency Department where they are expensive, space-occupying lesions. I understand that in our risk-averse society this is necessary to prevent the possibility of a habitual drunk aspirating his own vomit and dying without immeidate medical care. At the same time this kind of risk management isn’t cheap. If the public knew the cost they might be willing to live with slight chance of a drunk or two dying in police custody.

4. Futile care, which is in no way discouraged, sucks up a vast amount of medical care, everything from the physicians time to the cleaning lady mopping the floor of the ICU. Maybe by the time a patient is being fed through a tube, urinates through a tube, defecates through a tube, and breathes through a tube it’s time to let them go.

5. Doctors don’t know how to say “no” or admit defeat. The temptation, to which we easily succumb, is to shift responsibility by consulting specialists. I understand the need for specialists but by the time a patient accumulates a small platoon of them its time to examine, in terms of mortality versus cost, what all of the hired guns are really buying us.