Obamacare Socialized Medicine Rationing and the Elderly

Healthcare is not a right, it is a service provided by doctors and nurses who went to school to learn how to care for a sick human being. And they expect to be compensated for their services. Surely you would not expect your mechanic who learned how to fix your car, repair it for free, because it is your right to have a running vehicle.

Health insurance is not a right either, it is also a service. Can you control what an insurance company does and what pricing systems they use? Can you control what government does now that they are in charge of your socialized health insurance and healthcare, including the 15-member death panel?

We know the Senate does not care about Americans’ health insurance premiums and the quality of their healthcare. If they did, they would not have passed without reading and then failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), socialized medicine under government control. Passed by Democrats in the dead of night, and deemed by the Supreme Court a tax, ACA became a burden for Americans who were mostly satisfied with their previous premiums and their healthcare delivery. Sure, there were improvements necessary but not an entire overhaul worth trillions.

What good is having a shiny insurance card that says you are entitled to Obamacare but that care is denied to you when doctors are not taking your insurance, the quality of care is very poor, procedures are denied due to rationing and age, and your deductibles shot through the roof?

Like most Americans, who saw their health insurance premiums skyrocket and their care worsen since 2010, I am confused why politicians are forcing this monstrosity called Obamacare on us. Congressmen have exempted themselves from Obamacare and are protected by their own private plans but the rest of us will eventually have to suffer under the socialized medicine of the type that sentenced baby Gard to death in the U.K.

Seniors are already treated like "units" in hospitals. My mom was recently the victim of Obamacare in one of the alleged best hospitals in Northern Virginia. She was kept solely on IV fluids for three days, even though she is skin and bones, so that she would not throw up and force doctors to give her the upper GI and endoscopy tests she needed. Instead, they treated her for a bladder infection which was not the reason why she had been brought to the ER - she was vomiting blood and had stroke level BP.  She was crying for solid food!

Her doctor explained to me that they could not do the upper GI and endoscopy because the radiology group located in the hospital gave priority to outpatients, unless an inpatient was currently bleeding and/or vomiting. She vomited but they ignored her. Was it because she is 85 years old and an Obamacare "unit" and not worth spending the money on, or was it because she is a legal immigrant?

She was starved for three days and her important medicines for conditions like blood pressure and dementia were not administered, causing a serious relapse in her physical and mental condition. This is medical abuse when you tell a patient that comes into the ER with serious symptoms that they cannot have procedures except on an outpatient basis at a later date and withhold important meds that they are currently on.

No amount of protests, complaints, or inquiries on my part made a difference. This is what happens under socialized medicine when bureaucrats who know best make life and death decisions over us and our loved ones.

Mom lived under the boot of communism and escaped to this country in her late forties. The communists stripped her of everything she had ever earned, owned, and saved, including her pension after 30 years of work. She was not even given my dad’s pension. She lived here for over three decades under relative freedom. It is sad that now, in her twilight years, she is made to suffer again and will die under the neglect of socialized medicine that allocates funds to more productive individuals. Mom was productive too in her younger years.

Little Charlie Gard lost his battle with socialized medicine rationing in the U.K. Those who are unable to protect themselves, children and the elderly, are the first victims of socialized and rationed medical care because they cannot defend themselves. The way we treat seniors, the weak, and the most vulnerable speaks volumes of our lack of civilization and compassion. We should protect wildlife and our habitat but it seems that we care more for minnows and polar bears than we do human beings.

Mom lost five pounds she could not afford to lose while in hospital care for three days. They were more worried that she might fall than her actual survival. She was not fed anything for three days except water and IV antibiotics. She was lucky to have gotten out with her life.

It is bad enough that some elderly are physically abused in nursing homes and/or neglected by underpaid and understaffed medical personnel; they must now suffer the indignity of denied hospital medical care in the rationing environment of Medicare and Medicaid that were shortchanged in order to help fund Obamacare, and by the scarcity of doctors and nurses created by Obamacare.

So much for the unaffordable Affordable Care Act that provides substandard medical care and offers expensive insurance premiums to Americans who are now faced with huge deductibles each year, possible loss of insurance, and fines by the IRS for non-compliance.

Death Panels and the Progressive War on Menopausal Women

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that ten years after Obamacare will be fully implemented, more than 30 million Americans will still be without health insurance. Not to worry, there won’t be enough doctors to deliver proper care or much care at all if you do have insurance. And the dreaded Death Panel that Sarah Palin was disparaged over will also be in full operation.

The Independent Panel Advisory Board (IPAB) is Obamacare’s 15-member board of unelected, unaccountable to the public bureaucrats whose function is to make cuts in order to keep Medicare spending within certain parameters. These limits, starting in 2018, will consist of the rate of economic growth per capita plus one percentage point.

Since economic growth has been very sluggish due to a relatively deep recession, and the size of the economy has been shrinking, with higher unemployment and more discouraged workers than actually reported, Medicare spending will likely be lower, denying patients their much needed care. Additionally, Medicare is being stripped of $719 billion over a ten-year period in order to fund Obamacare.

These faceless omnipotent IPAB bureaucrats appointed by the President with the approval of the Senate will have unaccountable reign over your health. If your medical care or tests are denied, nobody will know if it is because there is no effective treatment for your illness or because one of those 15 people have decided that your life is not worth saving.

Ferrara wrote that “Obamacare requires IPAB to produce proposals to slow the growth in national health expenditures and non-federal health care programs. He continued, “This is a clear mandate to reduce both government and private sector health care spending.” If medical spending is limited even in the private sector, that is a deliberate form of health care rationing. http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/01/how_the_obamacare_death_panel_defies_the_constitution.html

Doctors will be overridden in their medical decisions by people with no medical training and patients may or may not get their needed tests or operations. Whether doctors will be at peace or in agreement with violating their Hippocratic Oath remains to be seen.

Many doctors will have been driven out of business by the low reimbursement rates from Medicaid and Medicare, will have retired, or will have switched to a different field entirely. Hospitals will also have been driven out of business by the massive debt amassed from servicing non-paying illegal aliens, impossible Obamacare mandates, and by low reimbursement rates from Medicare/Medicaid. Many private insurers will have been bankrupted by the financial expenditures to satisfy the health services mandates of Obamacare.

How many people will then pursue arduous medical school training, invest in human capital, invest in new developments in health care, new drugs, and new life-saving procedures if the return on investment is so low and medical care becomes severely rationed? As it is, there is a shortage of qualified medical personnel, but an augmented supply of millions of patients who are demanding care. What good is it if you have health insurance but cannot find a doctor who will accept you as a new patient, accept your insurance, or who is qualified to treat you?

Many Americans have been receiving letters informing them that doctors they’ve been using for years are no longer in the Obamacare approved exchanges and they must find new doctors. Other Americans enrolled in exchanges have had their plans switched two to three times due to the failure of the non-profit insurers to stay afloat in the face of an onslaught of claims eating away at their revenues and reserves, even with billions in federal grant money. Twenty-five of the 26 non-profit co-ops operating under Obamacare have registered losses so far.

If you are unable to receive the same timely and quality medical care that Americans have been accustomed to, if you are told that you can no longer buy the medicines or tests you need, receive proper cancer treatment to save your life, or see the doctors you’ve known for years and trusted, it is Obamacare mandates and its faceless agents reshaping how long you can live and what quality of life you are going to have.

As Dr. Donna Hurlock, a Board Certified Gynecologist, said, there is a “Medicare war against menopausal women” with its new “anti-estrogen policy that it’s hurting menopausal women.” This new policy is based on a 2002 National Institutes of Health study, Women’s Health Initiative, that claimed that estrogen replacement therapy (ERT) “poses excessive risks to menopausal women.” https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/whi/estro_pro.htm

Dr. Hurlock said that eighty years of estrogen use support the opposite conclusion that women on ERT live longer and better functional lives than women that elect not to replace hormones. Post-menopausal women that do replace their hormones “end up consuming fewer medicines than their peers because they don’t develop the many health problems that result from estrogen deficiency, such as sleep problems, high cholesterol, bone loss, memory issues, dizziness, vaginal dryness, etc.” http://fairfaxfreecitizen.com/2015/02/23/medicares-war-against-menopausal-women/?utm_source=Fairfax+Free+Citizen+Digest&utm_campaign=d97702cff7-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_69cf25d58d-d97702cff7-201781813

Medicare’s new policy as of January 1, 2015 is to deny payment for ERT and to substitute hormone replacement therapy (HRT) with “alternative” drugs such as anti-depressants, neurologic drugs, bone density drugs, and vaginal estrogen creams. Each of these “alternative” drugs have a long list of side-effects, potentially more dangerous and more expensive than hormone replacement therapy (HRT), decreasing the woman’s quality of life. To make matters worse, any HRT that includes testosterone has now been labeled a controlled substance and pharmacists must handle it accordingly. Such prescriptions expire every six months, necessitating repeat visits to the doctor.

Dr. Hurlock explained that many insurers are no longer “covering” her patients’ payments for HRT because “a group of ‘experts’ has decided that HRT becomes dangerous as soon as a woman celebrates her 65^th birthday, despite the plentiful literature to the contrary.” In her opinion, these experts are “clearly not making recommendations in the best interest of the patients based on the entire HRT literature.”

When the individuals, who wrote, publicized, lied about, voted on, and passed Obamacare as a tax, will be long gone from public life and forgotten, millions of Americans are going to suffer needlessly and potentially experience a shorter lifespan.

Liberals have created a faux “war on women.” There is a war, but it is a “war on your health,” a “war on middle aged women,” and a “war on the elderly,” all having a common denominator, rationing of care in order to reduce Medicare spending and to stretch the same health dollars to millions more, some of whom have broken into our country illegally. It is a war promoted by the progressive agenda that wants to fundamentally transform our country. They have succeeded beyond anybody’s dreams, with little resistance.

Copyright: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

 

Socialized Medicine Is Dangerous to Your Health

Twenty-four years after communism went underground in 1989 (and is resurfacing with a vengeance today), medical care has not improved by leaps and bounds. If you are 17 years old and injure your foot, even though you carry with you the expected envelope stuffed with cash for the inexperienced doctor, your toe will look like this after six weeks of “expert” care.

Doctors worked from 7 to 3 p.m. in the former “communist workers’ paradise” where I grew up. On weekends the hospital was pretty much empty of medical personnel, save for a few janitors and the guard at the gate. He had to make sure no dirty people compromised the sterility of the hospital. The janitors did not do much work, judging by the filth around, the stinky bathrooms, the respectable layer of dirt, and by the blood stains and other unidentifiable marks on the peeling walls and on the broken linoleum.

Doctors who were treated like gods interceding between life and certain death by neglect were paid lower than teachers but supplemented their meager income with monetary bribes brought in envelopes and with hard to find items such as soap, shampoo, meat, cigarettes, and other sundries. Such bribes bought a patient immediate attention, better care, a needed prescription, a blood test that took days instead of weeks and a chance at survival if the surgeon did not botch the operation. A doctor had a file with special clients in it, marked by alphabetized envelopes with the patient’s name and the amount of cash enclosed.

A few very good doctors were besieged by patients from a wide geographical region although it was against the law to treat them. They were to serve only the residents assigned to them by the communist party headquarters. Since quitting time was 3 p.m., some doctors continued their private practice illegally in their government assigned apartments. Everyone knew about it but the economic police did not stop it because their families often used the doctor’s services after hours as well. Even live chicken, eggs, butter, cheese, preserves, and wine were accepted as payment.

The poorly paid doctors were assigned to practice medicine in designated areas by the government, had thousands of patients, did not keep records, and their sparsely furnished waiting rooms were filled to capacity like sardines every day. Although medical care was “free” and people did not get much for free, after 3 p.m., nobody moved, everyone understood that now they had to pay to be seen.

As a child, I remember waiting with my Mom from 7 a.m. until late into the night to be seen by a doctor, holding a piece of cardboard with my assigned number on it, racked with fever, hoping to get the miracle pill that would bring my fever down.

The local pharmacy shelves were mostly empty even of that miracle drug (a bitter-tasting version of Tylenol called “piramidon”) but the doc had his own sources and we could buy it from him – the black market was thriving. Sometimes he even had antibiotics for sale. They were great because it cured the burning fire in my throat quickly. He would give me an excuse for school and I would go home and lay in bed for days, alternating between fever-induced bad dreams and reality.

Come to think of it, when we were in Italy recently, where medicine is socialized, Aspirin and Tylenol were regulated by government and could not be bought on the market without a prescription. I could not understand why since it was available on American posts and Italians were clamoring to buy it from them.

After only six years of medical school and no practical experience in hospitals or internships, all doctors were ill-prepared to care for their patients. Lucky people survived, those who were not so lucky succumbed to complications from simple procedures which the inexperienced doctors bungled. Hapless and innocent people who trusted doctors with incipient medical skills were laboratory rats.

Many family members died before their time from simple procedures such as appendicitis, tonsillectomies, hernias, thyroidectomies, and other surgeries that we take for granted here in the U.S. Raging infections would set in, some developed septicemia and gangrene from nicked organs and intestines, and patients died a painful and unnecessary death. None of the doctors were held accountable because families could not sue the government for malpractice.

The American Embassy evacuated their personnel for medical treatment to West Germany or other developed countries in the West, they were never sent to Romanian hospitals during Ceausescu’s communist era.

There are private clinics today in Romania that give stellar care and drugs are available for a fee. Capitalist free market care does work very well. But all the public hospitals and pharmacies that provide socialized medicine run out of their rationed drugs, supplies, surgeries, procedures, and tests early in the year. After that, they have no choice but to turn patients away and ration care based on age.

Dental medicine was very scary as well. Appointments for painful teeth that needed removing were made six months from the onset of an abscess or a painful cavity. Teeth were drilled, root canaled, and removed without any anesthetics in spite of the patient’s screams, pain or bloody discomfort, and the doctor used boiling, no autoclaving procedures for his instruments. He did not have an assistant or a nurse. Tooth cleaning or braces were not offered; the procedures were generally considered to damage teeth and not recommended in stomatology school.

Ambulances were a joke. Devoid of medical equipment then, they were more or less a way to transport patients from rural areas to urban areas hospitals. They did not arrive in a timely manner, offered no comfort to the patient during the very bumpy ride, and, aside from the driver who was more interested in picking up hitch-hikers to make an extra buck, there was no medical personnel on board. Things have improved under a more capitalist-based economy, ambulances have come a long way since then, but care is still sketchy and rationed. Hospitals run out of government allotted money for ambulance service relatively early in the year.  After that, severe rationing occurs.

Large hospital wards were depressing “wailing rooms” where elderly were stuck to die, screaming in pain, attended by family members who brought them food, sheets, morphine (if available) purchased outside the hospital, and without any nursing care much less around the clock as is the case in the U.S. If a patient did not have a family, he/she died a painful and neglected death.

Things have not changed that much in 24 years. Recently, my aunt cared for her husband round the clock in the hospital, administering his meds, giving him shots, in a more modern version of public hospitals in 2013 Romania.

I was horrified by the lack of medical personnel, cleanliness, and otherwise professional medical care. Nothing like the first rate care I had experienced in American hospitals. And this was one of the best public hospitals in Romania in which the skilled doctors actually saved my uncle’s life following brain surgery.

I was shocked when I tried to use the only restroom on the floor that both patients and visitors used. The tub and shower had not been used in a long time judging by the patina of thick grime everywhere. An elderly female patient dressed in street clothes was washing her dirty laundry by hand in the bathroom sink. The commode stall had huge open-wide windows, visible to the floors above. The stench reminded me of our high school latrines.

It is no surprise that many doctors have migrated from Romania to work in other EU countries where socialized medicine is a little less gruesome, remuneration is more generous, rationing is enforced by law, compliance rewarded, and euthanasia is practiced legally.

Can anyone try to imagine what our brand of socialized one-payer medical system will be like in the United States in the very near future?

The often repeated rhetorical phrases, “everyone knows it’s broken,” and the Pinocchio promise, “he will fix it,” mesmerized everyone as if by magic. One shudders to think what the “fixes” will be when the health care itself was not broken and everyone had universal healthcare anyway. All they had to do is show up at an emergency room sick and they were treated.

One reader named Gene surmised Obamacare as “A one word portent for the destruction of the world’s most enviable, most successful, and most sought-after and effective health care enterprise, through nationalization; accomplished tangentially, the crippling of the national economy, and an irreparable loss of personal liberty.”

 

 

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.

 

Unfortunately Named the Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009

Chance brought across my path an old friend, Dr. March, whom I had not seen in four years. During the last conversation, he was trying to convince me that electing President Obama would be a positive turn in the history of our country, particularly after the “dreadful Republican Bush.”

I do not see people so much as belonging to the Republican or Democrat Party but as promoters and believers of a particular social and fiscal ideology. Occasionally, Congress members of either party share identical beliefs and vote the same way, regardless of the D or R after their names. They no longer represent the will of the people who elected them but the will of the corporate interests and the lobby groups.

 

Many uninformed and ordinary Americans vote on their perceived understanding of the issues after watching biased commercials and presentations. Some Americans vote on family traditions. Other Americans vote for the most telegenic of the candidates, or whoever promises most welfare.

As a medical doctor and an academician, Dr. March argued at the time that Obamacare could not possibly destroy our medical system and make it any worse because it was already in a mess with so many insurance companies, in dire need of tort reform, with so much bureaucracy, and daunting paperwork requiring full time staff to deal with insurance plans.

No to worry, this week we found out that 4,000 new IRS agents will be hired to handle Obamacare. A nagging question kept swirling in my head, what does health care have to do with tax collectors? Is health care a tax? Why would tax collectors be part of the decision to treat people medically or perform surgery on patients?

According to the Hill, “the Obama administration is quietly diverting roughly $500 million to the IRS to help implement the president’s healthcare law. The money is only part of the IRS’s total implementation spending and it is being provided outside the normal appropriations process. The tax agency is responsible for several key provisions of the new law, including the unpopular individual mandate.” (The Hill, April 9, 2012)

Dr. March told me what a hard time his medical students were having finding jobs after spending $50,000 each year for a degree and how we are not going to have many primary care providers left – nobody will be willing to go to medical school if jobs are hard to find and salaries are capped by The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. He was bemoaning the fact that a lot of our healthcare will be provided by nurses and will thus be inadequate and lacking.

His solution was rather perplexing – find a president who is fiscally conservative and socially progressive. The pronouncement struck me as illogical and impossible, as I see those two as polar opposites. You cannot be fiscally conservative and spend money on social programs lavishly without going bankrupt at some point.

I did not dare ask him what his presidential choice would be in November. It is impolite to ask such questions unless a person volunteers the information. He did mention that his wife voted for Ron Paul in the primaries. Both had voted cheerfully and eagerly for Obama in 2008.

When I told him how corrupt the socialized medical care system was in Romania, 23 years after the fall of communism, he agreed that most good doctors in the former iron curtain nations left for other places where they were paid based on merit and not on a central government salary decree. Only doctors who accepted bribes to supplement their salaries stayed behind to deliver care to the population.

There are not enough doctors and nurses left behind and people do not have enough money for bribes in countries where medical care is free but care and drugs must be rationed. At some point there is not enough “free everything” to go around.

Socialized medical care in Western Europe's nations fares slightly better. Doctors are still paid a government capped salary, there is rationing of care, long waiting lists for procedures, and gross negligence in hospitals. When patients have sniffles, everyone is treated, no problem. That is when free medical care works best. When more expensive procedures and long-term care become an issue, rationing ensues, depending on the patient’s age.

Dr. March was not aware that Muslims are exempt from the requirements of The Affordable Health Care Choice Act but will be full beneficiaries of free health care paid by the rest of us, a blatant form of dhimmitude.

Because health care has become so expensive in Germany and birth rates are going down, Chancellor Angela Merkel is considering an extra tax on young people in order to support the pensions and health care costs of the burgeoning older population. Could that become a future issue in the U.S.?

The cost of Obamacare has been purposefully misrepresented. A recent and more accurate report doubles the cost. This does not take into account the 1,500 plus exemptions offered to many crony capitalists for a year.

Dr. March was not incensed by the fact that faith-based hospitals will be forced to provide abortion on demand or that contraceptives are considered health rights.

Obamacare is not about providing affordable healthcare choices, it is about government control by unelected bureaucrats with no medical degrees or training over hospital admissions, payments to doctors, medical devices, and forcing private insurance companies out of business. It is about the most massive transfer of power to the executive branch of the government.

The law rations care to seniors and other classes of citizens and gives free health care to illegal immigrants.  Free abortion services under Obamacare forces participation in abortions by members of the medical profession who find the procedure highly objectionable.

Dr. March concluded with an interesting observation, that, in the D.C. area, Republicans who live in Virginia and Democrats who live in Maryland are two distinct groups at odds in the fight over Obamacare while the rest of the country supports Obamacare. Perhaps a biased poll gave credence to his belief but the polls I read show the majority of the U.S. legal population against Obamacare.

It is a moot point if you are for or against Obamacare. It is already the law, the bureaucracy is already in place to completely overhaul and destroy the best care in the world, and we are waiting on the Supreme Court to weigh in with their opinion in June, which is likely to determine that the law is constitutional. We, the “units,” will see each other in line at the IRS office begging for healthcare, surgery, and pain pills or petitioning the 15-member non-medical “death panel” for mercy.

Funeral for Stela

Tuesday, June 1, 2010, aunt Stela was laid to rest. It was an ominous day with frightening lightning and thunderclaps. The clouds erupted into a torrential rain about the time her coffin was carried outside the home she built with her husband Costel forty years ago. Romanians are really superstitious people, a remnant of the Roman culture. They believe that if it rains, the deceased did not wish to die. If that is true, aunt Stela was the cover story of a spirited woman who wanted to live in spite of her dire circumstances. She believed and hoped for a cure from God until her last breath.
The elders of the village and relatives showed up to celebrate the life of the deceased however, the frightening weather kept many at home. Stela's wishes were not honored as the goverment denied permits to build an underground mausoleum. In traditional Roman fashion, she had saved her money in preparation for this day but she had to be buried in a hole in the ground half filled with water. Her casked was huge, as her limbs had separated from joints and she suffered many fractures as well. The bone cancer had eaten up her entire body but not her spirit. She used to tell me that she felt the cancer eating away at her bones. She was never at peace about death - she did not believe in the afterlife and there was so much to do around the house and garden. She always raised roses and a vegetable garden. The village priest tried in vain to bring her peace through numerous confessions but admitted to have failed. She was a tortured soul. After burial, it was customary to give away food and clothing in memory of the deceased. There were few people left in the hard driving rain to accept these gifts.
I wonder what would have happened if the socialist government had been merciful to Stela and not refused her surgery and treatment when she needed it? Were the people on the death panel responsible for the decision to withhold timely surgery, chemo, and radiation feeling guilty for killing Stela and so many patients before their time? Did older people not pay their dues to society? Did they not deserve respect and care in their old age? Did the members of the death panels feel pangs of regret for denying adequate morphine doses to patients who suffered so much pain, they no longer felt human and welcomed death as a relief? Who but God had the right to make or take life? Is there such a thing as a Hyppocratic oath anymore? Have we become so calloused in the face of pain and suffering? What are we if we cannot be defined by our humanity? Does rationing of medical care through mathematically clever formulas describe how advanced we are technologically, but how low we have sunk ethically and morally?

Aunt Stela was in a coma for ten days with lucid moments among many delirious rants. She was whispering in the last two days of her life. Her last wish was that the priest not spray her body with red wine during the last rites. She did not want to be buried dirty and soiled. She desired to be pretty, makeup in place, just the way she was in life.

I cry for her soul, I hope she found peace. I want to remember her the way she was - full of life, dry and witty humor, and positive until the very end. I spoke with her three weeks ago and she was actually laughing. What a positively powerful woman! God rest her soul!