Make Money or Kill Granny?

The heated health-care debate has consumed much of the past months' news for valid reason; it is a complicated mess involving fiscal, economic, and ethical issues. Evan Thomas presents a bold, risky point of view about end-of-life care using his personal experience of his grandmother's passing to expose the complex issues of health care in America. The dilemma that Thomas examines is whether the patients, who are going to die in the near future, should have the right to decide their medical course, or allow doctors to continue conducting more and more treatments on the dying patients, because their (doctors) salary depends on them.

Thomas, for the most part, outlines both sides of why the U.S. health care system keeps so many elderly persons alive. On one side, patients psychologically want to maintain human contact and sometimes it is through doctors. On the other side, Medicare is on a fee-for-service insurance systems where doctors are paid for the number of treatments and test they perform on a patient. This system seems unnecessary; however Medicare wants to "encourage hope" in all their patients. Aren't doctors' main purpose to save lives than "kill" lives? How can U.S. health care improve its quality of service to its patients' emotional need versus their physical needs?

"The real problem is unnecessary and unwanted care." America pays for the unnecessary, which in itself sounds unnecessary and foolish. Who has the final say in keeping a patient's life alive? The family? Patient? Doctor? Health-care? Government?