Ma died last week. She had been sick for 11 years--diabetes, congestive heart--but in the last 12 months she spent 6 of them in hospital: the last 4 months continually.
These last 12 months cost Medicare/private insurance $3million--or some portion of that, depending on what they negotiate w/ the providers.
I live 3000 miles from my parents, so I missed most of her last year, though we visited her in summer 08 for 10 days, and I spent 3 weeks w/ her last November, just as the priest was giving her the Last Rites.
She 'rallied' when I went back there, but to see her bloated w/ fluid, struggling for each breath, was truly difficult. When she and I were alone for a few moments, she would confide in me that she just wanted to go home. She didn't want to go to a rehab place for physical therapy so she could 'get back' to where she was in 08. She didn't want to stay in hospital, where they can keep you alive but you have no life. She just wanted to go home to her dog and house.
I worked on my dad and siblings, finally convincing them and the doctors that Ma had gone through enough. So last week they brought her home and 6 hours later she died peacefully w/ my father and her dog, Henry, at her side.
There are no 'bad' guys in this $3million story. As much as I knew that spending millions in the hospital would only buy her a short time--and only if she stayed in the hospital!!--I realized the family would have to arrive at the conclusion that enough was enough in due time.
Did the doctors perform too many procedures? yes. Did they pad the bills because my mother had Medicare plus 2 other policies: of course. But my father demanded that they do all they could for her, and until it became obvious to him that there was nothing more to do, he kept goading them on. In fact, he kept firing doctors who were 'giving up', replacing them with ones who would buy into a new round of false hope.
It was painful to watch Ma go through this, and difficult to acknowledge all the $$ being spent. I gently put it to my father that if mom were poor [my Dad is retired union blue-collar] her course of treatment would look much different. I also told him and my mother that I would never allow the doctors to do all these procedures to me, after witnessing all my mother went through.
She took it all, pretty much w/out complaining. My father went to the hospital every day for 8-12 hours besides paying for her home health worker to be there 6 days a week to feed/bathe her. For the 10 years prior to the last, my father took 24/7 care of her w/ the aide of the health worker. Dad is now 82; an old man who loved to fish and garden, which he didn't get to do much for the past 11 years. He will live w/ Henry, the 11 year old German Shorthair, until Henry dies, and then he'll live alone until he dies.
Ma just wanted to go home. It was all she could do to hold on until they brought her there, and then 6 hours later she turned her head to the side and closed her eyes. Even Henry knew she was gone, though he stayed next to her body until the mortician took it away.
More money wouldn't have made her life better, except for the health aide that comforted her, which my father paid for out of his own pocket. Most people don't get a partner like my father who gives up his life to share the fate of his wife, but the ones who do are the fortunate few.
There are no bad guys in this story. But PLEASE consider, when you rant about the imperfect Obama/Senate/Democratic healthcare bill, the lack of a public option or whatever other [legitimate] gripe you have, that NOTHING is a worse option than an imperfect legislation. With NOTHING the system will eventually collapse. The choices for millions like my parents will be clear: die quickly or have the surviving spouse die in poverty.
I will be going back in April to New Jersey to spend a few weeks with Dad and Henry. It was tough for him when I left last Saturday, but my siblings will visit often and eventually he'll find a life again. He lives 1 block from the Church: he moved there 50 years ago so we could all go to Catholic school, and now he goes to Mass every day. It keeps him going. We all have to do what it takes to get us through the next day. He says that he should have been there in the coffin next to my mother, but in time this too shall pass.