{"id":40901,"date":"2009-11-12T09:09:30","date_gmt":"2009-11-12T14:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"a9a30167-d3ab-43f0-9d3a-f306f46c76c2"},"modified":"2009-11-12T09:09:30","modified_gmt":"2009-11-12T14:09:30","slug":"making-end-of-life-wishes-known-is-rare-more-hospice-care-could-save-medicare-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/40901","title":{"rendered":"Making End-Of-Life Wishes Known Is Rare; More Hospice Care Could Save Medicare Money"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ap\/20091111\/ap_on_he_me\/us_health_overhaul_hospice_care\">The Associated Press<\/a> reports on hospice care.\u00a0&#8220;Lillian Landry always said she wasn&#8217;t afraid to die. So when death came last week, the 99-year-old was lying peacefully in a hospice with no needles or tubes. Her final days saw her closest friend at her side and included occasional shots of her favorite whiskey, Canadian Mist. Landry is an exception. Unlike most Americans, she made her end-of-life decisions years ago: no heroic measures to save her &#8230; The health overhaul bill that narrowly passed the House on Saturday includes a provision to nudge more people to confront such choices: It would pay for end-of-life counseling for Medicare patients.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>Because Medicare beneficiaries\u00a0account &#8220;for the vast majority of U.S. deaths&#8221; the treatment\u00a0people receive\u00a0&#8220;in the last year of life accounts for roughly a quarter of Medicare&#8217;s budget.&#8221; Dr. Joel Policzer,\u00a0a medical director for a hospice,\u00a0says that often &#8220;a\u00a0dying elderly patient may have wanted less invasive care. But it doesn&#8217;t happen. &#8216;It doesn&#8217;t happen because people are never asked. If they were, people would tell you they want to die at home in bed, surrounded by their family, their friends and their pets,&#8217; he said&#8221; (Sedensky, 11\/11).<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/khn\/fulltext\/~4\/0QtAidnyz1w\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Associated Press reports on hospice care.\u00a0&#8220;Lillian Landry always said she wasn&#8217;t afraid to die. So when death came last week, the 99-year-old was lying peacefully in a hospice with no needles or tubes. Her final days saw her closest friend at her side and included occasional shots of her favorite whiskey, Canadian Mist. Landry [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}