For years, advance medical directives, popularly known as living wills, have been promoted as giving people control over what happens to them at “end of life”, i.e., when they are in dire medical straits. (1) It is hard to disagree with the concept. Certainly, people have the right to refuse treatment they don’t find helpful … Continue reading Lisa Blumberg: Getting Beyond Advance Medical Directives
Kaiser Health News recently carried an article encouraging people to create videos to help explain what’s in their advance directives, which are often overly complex legal boilerplate or overly simplistic checkbox forms. One thing I like about the article, Straight From The Patient’s Mouth: Videos Can Clearly State Your End-Of-Life Wishes, is the discussion of … Continue reading Supplementing Your Advance Directive With A Video
Below is an article published on Friday, 11/3/17 by Kaiser Health News. The original article can be found at https://khn.org/news/new-instructions-could-let-dementia-patients-refuse-spoon-feeding/ and is republished here, according to the guidelines of Kaiser Health News. A “right to die” organization based in Washington state is pushing a new advanced directive that would allow people with dementia to refuse to be … Continue reading WA, USA: Assisted Suicide Advocates Push Documents for People with Dementia to “Refuse” Spoon-Feeding
NDY’s comment letter can be summarized as follows: We do not oppose payment to physicians for advance care planning discussions with their patients, but we want the payment regulation delayed until the disability community and others can, with CMS support, develop new advance care planning informational materials that do not rely on “better dead than … Continue reading NDY Files Public Comment on CMS Proposal on Advance Care Planning
Thursday, April 16, was National Healthcare Decisions Day. We probably should have made note of it. But then again, we’ve pretty much ignored it since one post I wrote in 2008 making note of the day and NDY’s take on it: In case you missed it, today is National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD). We’re all invited to … Continue reading A Belated Recognition of National Healthcare Decisions Day: “Good Practice” by Michael Barton (video)
