Are death panels on the rebound? Obamacare envisioned Medicare paying physicians to discuss end-of-live-care with their patients. When this sparked fierce blowback from citizens who feared that “death panels” would ration care to elderly patients, the Administration backed off.
However, the American Medical Association (AMA) has been lobbying for the execution (pun intended) of this provision. The AMA is a business which profits from its monopoly over the billing codes that physicians use when they submit claims to Medicare. The more billing codes there are, the better it is for the AMA.
For patients, however, it is risky to allow the government to pay physicians to counsel us on end-of-life issues. There is another approach, but it is so emotionally challenging that it may be impossible to implement.
Read the entire article at Forbes.
Research and commentary from a former senior executive in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
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