His father had a stroke and it was apparent that he would not last long. Apparently the family had wanted Mr. Hinrichs to spend his last days in a hospice. However ...
But we found out that Dad’s insurance wouldn’t help cover the first 30 days of the care facility unless he first spent three nights in the hospital.
Rather than gathering at a hospice to give final farewells to dad, the Hinrichs family had a harrowing emergency room experience. The end of life experience happened in a less than optimal space.
The end of life should have happened at the hospice which was designed as a place for terminal care with facilities arranged for families saying final farewells. Because the hospice is geared toward the end of life experience, they do a better job at a lower cost than the emergency room.
Of course the Hinrich's experience is simply the way that bureaucracies work. The bureaucrat has a sheet of paper that dictates action. As the left continues the progress from freedom to socialism, we find more and more of the important decisions of our lives dictated by caprices of our new feudal lords.
I've worked with a Utah State insurance firm and got to see the belly of the beast. The hospital has more political clout than the hospice; so the process demands a hospital stay first. The new think that builds bureaucracies is antithetical to life.
We would do far better if we organized our society so that people had the resources to make their decisions. The people who want to fight to the end can last days difiantly in the emergency room. Those that want a gathering of family and friends could spend final days in a hospice.
I know that the socialists reading this blog will claim that there is no way that the little people can ever have resources to handle the events that happen in life.
But, wait a second, the hundreds of billions that the little people dump into insurance is just such a resource. The bureacracy chose the most expensive route.
Unfortunately, rather than telling us to build our resources for anticipated expenses, our modern culture tells us to put trust our health care expenses to "professionals" in the insurance industry. We are then to fritter the rest of our resources away.
IMHO, insurance should only be for expenses outside the norm.
End of life is not an unexpected thing. It should not be treated as something outside the norm.
It would be far better to organize our society so that it was the norm for the little people to have some $60k saved up for inevitable end of life expenses.
If taxes on labor were lower, we would actually find that all of these services that we desire are affordable.
The primary component of both hospice and emergency care is human labor. Saving up for this care is largely the matter of people exchanging the excess labor they had when healthy for labor when they are in need.
The idea that it is outside the means of the little people to exchange their labor for the labor of other little people is as absurd as it is contemptuous.
BTW, I called the Hinrichs "little people" to emphasize that even contemptuous professors sitting in ivory towers should be able to recognize the fact that health care is a matter of little people exchanging their labor for the labor of other little people.
No matter how hard the professoriat works to indoctrinate the drones in the public schools, the indoctrination never changes the basic math.
The primary problem in health care is that we've employer financed insurance scheme has created a situation where a bureaucracies has captured decisions that we should be making on our own.
The Hinrichs experience was not driven by lack of resources, but by the fact that their resources were in the wrong configuration.
Anyway, I give my sympathies to a fellow Utah blogger who just lost a loved one. To add insult to injury some joker the guy never even met started calling his family "little people." It is harsh world.
Thanks, Kevin. I very much appreciate your comments. And yes, we are the little people in this equation.
ReplyDeleteThe really bizarre thing about this is that my folks had enough savings to cover the time in hospice, even if the insurance had paid nothing. But the medical industrial practitioners had my Mom so scared of having to pay exhorbitant costs out of pocket and of having the appearance that she wasn't doing everything possible to extend Dad's life that she didn't even question the requirement to put Dad in the hospital first.
The only other option that the industry folks even mentioned was just letting Dad pass away at home. Unfortunately, Dad's needs while he was still coherent required the ability to administer medications and some specific knowledge about care of a dying individual.
In actuality, the hospital ended up working with us, putting Dad in an out-of-the-way room, and providing nurses that were quite compassionate. But it would have been much nicer had we been able to spend these days in a hospice facility.
Knowing what I know now, I'd say to heck with the insurance. We're going to do what's best for us and deal with the finances afterward.
A better description is that the bureaucracy has tricks that make us feel like we are little people so that they can stuff us in their preformatted slots.
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