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It's Time for 'The Talk' About Rationing Care

At end of life, openness reduces stress for all: Goodman

By Kevin Spak, Newser Staff

Posted May 8, 2009 1:10 PM CDT

(Newser) – Two weeks before she died, Barack Obama’s terminally ill grandmother had a hip replacement. Obama said he’d have paid for the operation, but questioned whether society should have to. “I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues,” he said. But maybe morality and economics actually dovetail here, Ellen Goodman writes in the Boston Globe. It’s time, as a nation, we had “the talk” about dying.

Most people say they want to die at home, but 80% die in hospitals. “So much of our money goes to the kind of death we don’t want,” says Goodman. Studies show that patients who have living wills and less aggressive treatment have less stress and better quality of life as they die. “If this is rationing,” Goodman says, “I call it rational.”

[Images (2)]

[Quotes (3)]

About 80% of people die in hospitals. (Shutterstock)

Barack Obama in seen in 1979 during his high school graduation in Hawaii with his grandmother Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham. (Obama Presidential Campaign)

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Most people want to die "peacefully" at home but 80% die in hospitals. So much of our money goes to the kind of death we don't want. - Ellen Goodman

More expensive care is not always better care. Doing everything can be the wrong thing. The end of life is one place where ethics and economics can still be braided into a single strand of humanity. - Ellen Goodman

What our system may need is not more intervention but more conversation. Especially on the delicate subject of dying. - Ellen Goodman

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It's Time for 'The Talk' About Rationing Care