America's Medical Secret

If you do not want any "heroic efforts" to extend your life and sign a "living will" indicating that, your treatment team including your doctors will gladly honor your wishes and place a DNR (do not resuscitate) order at the front of your chart and all over your room. If, on the other hand, you want everything done to sustain life, and you and/or your surrogates are demanding full code, the treatment team may well ignore your instruction and employ an overt DNR, telling you and your family members (surrogates) that you are a hopeless case and tell you further effort at keeping you alive is futile, or a covert DNR in which the treatment does not tell you they intend to withhold care but do so anyway. The looming "death panels" will accelerate this culling of the aged and/or infirm, but whether medical providers are honest and tell patients and their representatives that they intend to deprive the patient of what it takes to sustain life remains to be seen. I fear they will simply say the decision was taken out of their hands and that the Federal Independent Payment Advisory Board would not permit them to try to extend the life of the patient. It remains to be seen how hard families of the aged fight to keep their loved ones alive, and if physicians and medical staff will side with life and join them or rubber stamp the will of a government that wishes to rid itself of people whose lives have become expensive to preserve.