birdog1960

i'm on the ethics committee for my hospital. a new commitee member (a pastor)asked this question last meeting. the best that could be said with certainty was that the numbers are steadily increasing. in my practice, it's about 50% for medicare patients. it deserves mentioning that addressing the issue is a requirement of the aca initiated wellness exams for medicare patients. it was a provision fought by many conservatives under the broad spectre of "death panels".

i've discussed advance directives with 4 people so far today. that's typical. will everyone i talked to refuse heroic measures? of course not. but discussing it openly is the way to proceed towards better end of life choices. sorry to hear that. hospice can be a godsend if done right. i would never agree to being involved in active euthanasia, however. some doctors will: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/05/21/408455816/coded-talk-about-assisted-suicide-can-leave-families-confused

actually, we do. everyone has the right to refuse treatment. hospice is widely used.

this is certainly a part of the problem but there are many patients that are unwilling to give in to the inevitable: "i want everything done" is a common sentiment. that, however, is not the problem behind treatment with reasonable chances of success costing 100k or more. agreed. legalized bribery should stop. but you can check who is on the payroll at propublica. it lists pharma payments to every US doc and percentages of generics prescribed. it's all public knowledge now, as it should be. http://www.propublica.org/series/dollars-for-docs

i think you allow direct negotiations between medoicare and the manufacturers. a board of expert oncologists should be on medicares side of the table determining relative value of the drugs with eventual development of a national formulary. if pt want something outside formu;lary, they'd probably end up paying the exhorbitant prices they pay now anyway.

nowadays, we use soap. works quite well, actually. as progressives we're prone to giving people the benefit of the doubt. it's our nature.

a top oncologist speaks out at a national cancer meeting: http://www.npr.org/2015/06/01/411271175/high-price-of-cancer-treatment-drugs-is-unsustainable-doctor-says. i agree completely with him. comments? from a forbes article on the issue: I don’t agree that our national inability to face death is the main problem here. Instead, it’s the baroque system of paying for medicines that we’ve created because of our fear of socialist price controls. Medicare’s not allowed to negotiate prices. Pressure on the price of drugs comes from two forces: from insurers forcing patients to pay some of the costs out of pocket, which can result in the human disaster of people forced to pay $60,000 for a lifesaving drug even though they have insurance, and from insurers negotiating with drug firms to get rebates on the back end. Pharma complicates this by having programs that help patients pay their copays, and by raising prices to counteract the discounts, so the prices get higher.

i suspect your percentiles are grossly miscalculated owing to the presence of posters with multiple accounts and handles.

people in glass houses...at any rate, i thought the key word for this thread was insult. i suppose redefining the theme of a thread is a form of insult to the op. given his post, he has no cause to complain ,however. and you should stop assuming that your insults, baits and barbs are effective in bothering people. repetition is just boring, not infuriating.

when it becomes a badge of honor and source of pride (see above), it's a problem.

what does incivility add to the discussion? it only detracts. informed people can strongly disagree on topics. the patriot act is a timely and important example. but you aren't hearing rand paul insult mitch mcconnel over it, at least not publicly. his argument (and reputation) would only seem weaker if he did.

how would anyone not? it's incorrect regardless.

who died and made you king? there's much less here that i agree with than there is that i vehemently disagree with. insults are for the feeble minded and weak or done out of exasperation in response to the feeble minded and weak. they should be unwelcome and discouraged. maybe a change to civility would actually attract some desirable and interesting new posters...

lmao. whaley, yeah, brilliant!

prices quoted in this piece seem incompatable with biz success. would be a definite "no" for me. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/08/15/340653853/startups-pitch-cricket-flour-as-the-best-protein-you-could-eat

i think it would certainly help. and the absurdity of subsidizing companies that pay ridiculously low wages through food stamps and rent subsidies etc to their employees could also cease.

and the intimate connection between the $15 minimum wage and the welfare state seems to have escaped evryone here for 3 pages...the new slavery, indeed.

it has to do with this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science Ever since classical antiquity, science as a type of knowledge has been closely linked to philosophy. In the West during the early modern period the words "science" and "philosophy of nature" were sometimes used interchangeably,[3].3 and until the 19th century natural philosophy (which is today called "natural science") was considered a branch of philosophy.[4] However, "science" has also continued to be used in a broad sense to denote reliable and teachable knowledge about a topic, as reflected in modern terms like library science or computer science. This is also reflected in the names of some areas of academic study such as social science and political science. economics seems to fit the bill. philosophy, sociology, psychology, even literature seem to fit. but in only one of these is there a reasonably high likelihood of financial success. and we all know that's the true measure of professional achievement to so many americans.

if you haven't seen it watch the snowden movie. you should before you judge him and his motives. he knows plenty. and he's a genius. you don't get to where he did so quickly if you're not. you can see the gears working in the movie and they are not ordinary gears in any way. if you can't appreciate that genius then you've likely never been around it. and motives? i'm guessing exile to russia, away from his girlfriend, was never a great aspiration i'll bet in the world of finance in which you live, you run into more than a few ba's with economics degrees from some prestigious liberal arts school and later mba's from another. and i'll bet on the income measure of success, many do pretty well. does that make it science? well,no. but it likely validates the degree in your eyes.

demographic collection is a science. it's not always in reference to politics. it's frequently employed in the social sciences.

so i can mark you down as against police profiling? cops should be just as likely to do searches on little old ladies as ex cons? of course he does. entirely expected opinion but brave to publicly make it.

it's called polling. it's soft science, but sciencew nonetheless, thus the much of the far right despises it especially if it looks bad for their candidate, eg the last prez election.

debt free, unlike far too many pols. and interestingly, which side members of the public take on this issue is less about education and more about conservatism and religion. i wonder what can be deduced by this finding. http://www.randalolson.com/2014/09/13/who-are-the-climate-change-deniers/ "It’s fairly clear from these graphs that religious, Republican American conservatives are the majority of climate change deniers today" If Kahan is right, the implication is that we need to talk about climate science in a way that is entirely devoid of cultural meanings that will antagonize the right.

a large group of morons are with you. the educated and unbeholden largely aren't.

well, no. witness the legions of deniers. scientists aren't nearly as good at leading sheep as are fascists and neocons.