My Mom Has Become the Obama Care "Unit"

My Beloved Mom

The first golden day of autumn has become the cold, barren winter of my Mom’s life.

A week ago I was planning to take Mom on a flight to Romania to see her siblings one last time. As I attempted to renew her passport, I remember wondering if the bureaucratic wheels will turn fast enough in sixty days. Would she still be able to travel then? How prophetic those words have become! Now she is locked inside a body that can no longer move. One moment she was vibrant and mobile, and the next moment her life was turned upside down.

The doctors ordered tests and more tests but were unable to find what caused her ataxia. The hospital staff operated a tight business around the elderly “units” of Obama Care. Everyone wore a cardio monitor and the beds were fitted with alarms in case the patients decided to wonder unauthorized. The goal was to have as few accidents and falls as possible and an ideal infection control.

The nursing staff was fantastic, well trained, and highly dedicated. The doctors, hailing from many third world nations, were too busy with private practices to meet with patients’ families. Their orders for tests, drugs, and charts were relayed through third parties. Most did not even make eye contact with other humans, keeping their faces down in the elevator.

It seemed to a keen observer that the lost art of humane face to face medicine has been replaced by mounds of paperwork, electronic dictation, and non-medically trained baby sitters.

How would they function if the entire Obama Care-mandated electronic system crashes? Would they still be able to write down the patient’s name, medical history, the type of drugs administered, and do simple math to calculate medicine dosage? Who will control and share the patients’ sensitive data and how will it be used to help them or against them?

I had to fill out tons of Medicare paperwork with some highly intrusive and unnecessary questions. Mom had to sign one sheet herself. With shaky hands, she was able to muster the first four letters of her name; the rest became a blob of black ink, a far cry from the beautiful cursive writing of the past.

Without a stroke, a heart attack, or any obvious cause for her distress, Mom was a patient in urgent need of discharge. Her “case worker,” a very cold and businesslike individual, made arrangements to discharge this “unit” before the infection cleared up. The last antibiotic IV dose was finished 15 minutes before she was whisked away in an ambulance. Her bed was needed for the next case.

I wished I could carry mom to the deck, and sit her on her favorite glider. Her colorful straw hat that shielded her eyes from the sun is still resting on the floor. Mom’s usual eagle eyes are dim and clouded with fear and confusion now. She sat in this chair for hours every day, watching the birds, the squirrels, the occasional blue heron, the resident pair of red foxes, the regular deer family grazing in our back yard, and the beaver running from the pond into the woods.

On this beautiful first day of fall, Mom became resident in a rehab nursing home, hoping to relearn how to walk. My eyes filled with tears as Mom scanned my face for answers and I had none, just words of encouragement. She misses Bogart, our Snowshoe Siamese. A highly co-dependent cat, Bogart senses her absence. Meowing at her closed bedroom door, he decides to sleep on the floor as if waiting for her immediate return.

Few well established and desirable rehab nursing homes take Medicare patients. Most are now private enterprises or advertised as faith-based, keeping unwanted individuals away.

Mom survived communism, the drab life there, and socialized medicine. She is making a full circle back to the drab life of survival in a nursing home in the most civilized nation on earth that chose to replace its stellar medical care with the failed socialist model a la Castro Care, in which rationing and “death panels” force Americans past the age of 70 into “unit” status.

I am not sure if Mom will every walk again. God only knows and we pray that she does. It is scary enough being old and sick, but even more frightening for someone who does not speak much English, having to function in an unfamiliar environment, among total strangers who are paid to help her survive, far away from home, far from everything and everyone she holds familiar and dear.

 

Elder Abuse under Obama Care

Jane* went to bed one night last week, thanking God for her many blessings. She woke up next morning screaming, an entirely different person. Hallucinating, alternating between an imaginary world that only she could see and hear and lucidity, her family took her to the local hospital. She was admitted immediately and routine blood tests and an MRI were ordered.

Because Jane is 74 years old and a “unit” under Obama Care, her utility to society must be low in the complicated formula the bureaucrats have devised to kill as many inconvenient elderly as possible.

New rules under Medicare and Tricare required that a case manager be assigned to her. Jane was no longer a patient with feelings, humanity, personality, but a “case.” Think of her case manager as someone whose sole purpose was to provide as little care as possible to an elderly American in dire need.

Flailing in pain, crying for help, and scared, Jane was tied to her bed to “calm her down” in spite of the fact that she has severe inflammatory arthritis in her hands. Her dentures and glasses were given to a nurse for safekeeping and she promptly lost them. It would be another 24 hours before they were found.

Jane’s husband Rob* served in the National Guard for years in a very blue state* in a predominantly blue collar town. It was the right thing to do for our nation and he had hoped that our country would keep its promise to care for him and his wife medically in their twilight years. After all, a civilized society is defined by its humanity, by its treatment of the weak, the old, and the helpless. It turned out not to be the case, the government failed miserably in its promise.

Since the routine tests showed an elevated bacterial count, the infectious disease specialist ordered a spinal tap and counseled the family about the need of such a test. The doctor on duty however, overrode the order and lied to the family that she had spoken to the infectious disease specialist and that he had decided there was no need for a spinal tap after all.

The family was advised to look for a nursing home to move Jane into as soon as possible since she had dementia and the hospital was unable to help her. Discharge papers were filled out. With teary eyes, her husband Rob was struggling to concentrate in order to complete the stack of papers unceremoniously shoved in front of him.

Several hours later, the infectious disease specialist reappeared during rounds to check on his patient Jane, to make sure the spinal tap was done. To his surprise, his order had been cancelled by the doctor on duty and the case manager was busy with discharge paperwork. He reinstated the spinal tap order and invalidated the illegal release from the hospital which he had not signed nor ordered.

Infuriated, two family members filed complaints the next morning against the admission doctor and the case manager. As everyone was crying from stress, relief, and hope that perhaps Jane’s symptoms were due to meningitis or encephalitis, treatable illnesses, the case manager walked in and demanded to know in very harsh tones why the family had neglected her instructions the previous day to choose a nursing home from the list provided. She also threatened them with payment liability for the hospital bill if she stayed beyond the discharge date. She said, “We may just have to make the nursing home decision for you.” Although nobody gave this woman power of attorney over Jane, the family was bullied into submission and obeyed. They picked the closest nursing home, 5 minutes away from Jane’s home.

As they visited the nursing home, the family was surprised to find out that Jane’s entire life history and medical records had already been emailed to them by the case manager without the family’s permission. The family made a verbal complaint to the hospital director for the maltreatment of Jane and their invasion of privacy and decision-making.

Jane was calm enough today and had her spinal tap. She is awaiting the test results. In the meantime, her immediate family, generational staunch Democrats and supporters of Obama, was numb with shock and outrage that able-bodied Americans on welfare who refuse to work and illegal aliens are going to be medically insured and treated at the expense of hard-working Americans like Rob and Jane who paid their dues to society in many ways over decades, while Jane is treated worse than an animal, moved back and forth over the course of several days from the psych ward to a regular hospital floor. She became one of the early victims of the much touted Obama Care that “does not have death panels and rationing.”

Sadly, this country is falling into the hell trap of communism very quickly. What good is medical insurance if the medical care is unavailable, non-existent, sub-standard, and most of all, inhumane?

*Names have been changed and the state withheld at the request of the family, to protect loved ones from more government reprisals.

 

Silvio Canto Jr. Week in Review July 8, 2013

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cantotalk/2013/07/08/todays-message