Health Care System and Capital Punishment

Health Care System and Capital Punishment

In the health care system, it is very difficult for residents of care centers or assisted living homes to remain in the home instead of being transferred to the hospital in the last few hours of their life. For example, New York State requires that residents be admitted to the general hospital when the physician decides it is medically appropriate. Many residents, however, have the desire to spend their last few hours among the people they know and in a place that they’re familiar with. Few terminally ill residents even survive the transfer over to the hospital. The patient is jostled on gurneys under glaring lights, and bustled around among car accident victims, gunshot wounds and so forth. Many administrators in nursing homes prefer to see the resident transferred out rather than deal with possible lawsuits of neglect. Medicare actually rewards nursing homes for sending dying patients to the hospital. They profit from what is called the “bed hold policy”, which is designed to guarantee the resident a spot in the nursing home for three weeks. The nursing home is paid the money they would normally receive, even though the hospitalized residents don’t use staff or services in the nursing home such as laundry, medical and dietary services, nursing, or physical therapy. Many physicians will request that the resident be moved to the hospital because the physician receives more money for hospital visits than visits to nursing homes. Hospitals gain money because Medicare reimburses hospitals by the hour for emergency room care. It also pays for tests and procedures performed even in the last few hours of a person’s life, though these tests and procedures are usually futile and serve no purpose other than running up the medical bill of the patient. The hospitals receive more money for the test and procedures that they do than nursing homes do. Many residents hope that at the end of their life, they will be spared the trauma of being moved to a hospital to die. Many...

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