Imagine that you are over 65 years old and you have a failing heart. Your doctor tells you that you are at “maximum medical treatment” and are not eligible for a heart transplant because of your age and other medical conditions. Then the doctor mentions that a pump could be implanted in your body to help your heart pump more blood; a left ventricular assist device or LVAD.
Imagine a small device put into your chest during open heart surgery that could help you pump enough blood around so that some of your old energy would return and you could resume some, but not all, of your usual activities.
Imagine that Medicare would pay for the operation, device, and medical follow-up. Then try to imagine what the $228,039,342 Medicare paid for about 1500 of these operations would look like if spread out on a table in hundred-dollar bills.
Imagine what it would be like to be one of the 55% (815) of patients who survived the operation and left the hospital alive after receiving this pump. Imagine how even happier you would be if you were one of the 43% (350) discharged alive who was still alive 2 years later. Imagine your relief when Medicare pays the average $1,000 a day hospital rate for the 56% of pump recipients who have to be rehospitalized at least once in the 6 months after implantation.
Imagine your perplexing thoughts when a statistician tells you that your life extension cost about $60,057 “per quality-adjusted life-year”.
Imagine that your psyche and your family can handle the burdens of multiple medical visits, utter dependence on the infallibility of a medical device, 24/7 family care and vigilance, strict adherence to medication regimens, worries about medical and financial complications, and alteration of body image perceptions that can lead to depression and anxiety.
Imagine how your life might actually end. If you turn off the pump it is suicide. If your doctor or family member turns off the pump it is either euthanasia, assisted suicide, or ethical withdrawal of therapy depending on the status of your permission (and maybe the State you are in). Perhaps you will develop a new fatal condition from which you will die with the pump running. Imagine if you lived long enough to require a pump replacement.
Imagine that part of the pre-operative process before the pump is implanted is a detailed discussion with your physician (and your family hopefully) about how and when YOU would want the pump turned off.
NOW … IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE DICK CHENEY. *
Then imagine how a “rationing” process to cut medical care costs under Medicare might work in this situation.
Imagine how it might work if you were the patient rather than Mr. Cheney.
Blogs have already appeared making the argument that Steve Jobs would not have lived his “extra” two years with a liver transplant under U.K. or Canadian health systems.
Medical ethics are about “where you draw the line”. Remember that in the beginning of this scenario your doctor said you were “ineligible” for a heart transplant. That was a drawn line, a rationing decision. Our current dilemma and sometimes heated discussion is really about WHO draws the line. (Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance or pharmaceutical company, Congress, professional specialty societies, health care lobbyists, medical ethics committees, Comparative Effectiveness Research in the U.S., NICE in the U.K., individual physicians and patients, or God)
*shamelessly copied from Matthew McConaughey’s dramatic closing speech to the jury
saving Samuel L. Jackson’s life in A Time To Kill by John Grisham.
References;
Journal of Medical Ethics, Spring 2011, Vol.18, issue 2, published by Lahey Clinic; LVADs as destination therapy: difficult ethical decisions.
Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System, Daniel Callahan, 2009, Princeton University Press
HUB's LIST of medical fun facts 