There are more than 250,000 people in the U.S. at the end stages of heart failure. Of those about 15% are in critical need of a heart transplant. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) tightly regulates organ transplant…
I have always authored and posted my own essays but this one by Ezekiel Emanuel strikes home for so many of us who have experienced the loss of the process at the end of life...so I am sharing with all…
What happens when you make a promise to yourself and to your mother “I will never…put you in a nursing home?” Does life get in the way of those plans and promises? I posit that it does, and painfully so.…
July 2017 report published by the Population Research Bureau provides both good and bad news about our aging society and the prevalence of Alzheimer’s and vascular dementias. It is undeniable that the absolute number of Americans with dementia is increasing,…
“Silence gives consent,” according to St. Thomas More. That deafening silence was evident on CBS Sunday Morning last month during an interview with Barbara Coombs Lee, a leading advocate for physician-assisted suicide and president of Compassion and Choices. When did she…
What has happened to our health care system? Physicians are now called “providers” and patients are “consumers.” Primary care doctors are buried with insurance paper work, checking the appropriate boxes, and using the right billing codes. Add to that, they…
The classic Hippocratic Oath, translated by Heinrich Von Staden, requires a new physician to swear to the following oath: And I will use regimens for the benefit of the ill in accordance with my ability and my judgment, but from…
Do you recall when Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the chief architect of the Affordable Care Act, made a chilling announcement that he does not wish to live beyond the age of 75 because his productive life will be over? As explicit…
U.S. healthcare spending is poised to grow at an average of 5.7 percent annually over the next decade, stretching government budgets with an upswing in the economy, an aging population and expanded coverage under the Affordable Care Act. By 2023,…