Doctors will soon be able to receive Medicare payments for end-of-life planning.
Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment....
The new rule says Medicare will cover “voluntary advance care planning,” to discuss end-of-life treatment, as part of the annual visit.
Under the rule, doctors can provide information to patients on how to prepare an “advance directive,” stating how aggressively they wish to be treated if they are so sick that they cannot make health care decisions for themselves.
This is of course completely sensible and will be taken as good news for anyone who has ever watched a loved one face a terminal illness.
It is also of course being screeched at by the wingnut-whippers who avoid having to work real jobs by scamming the pig-ignorant wingnut masses who enjoy frottaging themselves into absurd, hysterical lathers over imaginary oppression. "Death panels"! And even worse, the legislature doing things. Capn' Dinks:
This is just the opening gambit of a strategy Obama will use throughout the coming year in order to achieve through regulation what a Democrat-run Congress could not deliver through legislation.
Funny. I missed this burning rignt-wing resentment over the executive branch acting imperiously in regards to the legislature from the years 2000-2008.
Of course when the Bushitistas were in charge such concerns were expressed in regards not to pretend "issues," but actual ones, like energy policy, stampeding the country into crap wars, and torture, so I guess there is something like consistency in the "conservative" position. This would be the sort of "consistency" to be discovered in substances such as month-old milk.