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Death of outrage over talking about dying
Nrupen A Bhavsar1, Sara Constand2, Matthew Harker3
1Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, North Carolina, USA.
Objectives:
We examined public reaction to the proposed Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services rule reimbursing physicians for advanced care planning (ACP) discussions with patients.
Methods:
Public comments made on regulations.gov were reviewed for relevance to ACP policy and their perceived position on ACP (ie, positive, negative and neutral). Descriptive statistics were used to quantify the results.
Results:
A total of 2225 comments were submitted to regulations.gov. On review, 69.0% were categorised as irrelevant; among relevant comments (n=689), 81.1% were positive, 18.6% were negative and 0.002% were neutral. Individuals submitted a greater percentage of the total comments as compared to organisations (63.5% and 36.5%, respectively).
Conclusions:
The US Medicare programme is a tax financed social insurance programme that covers all patients 65 years of age and older, including 8 in 10 decedents annually, and it is the part of the US healthcare system most similar to the rest of world. There has been a trend globally towards recognising the importance of aligning patient preferences with care options, including palliative care to deal with advanced life limiting illness. However, ACP is not widely used in the USA, potentially reducing the use of palliative care. Reimbursing ACP discussions between physicians, patients and their family has the potential to have a large impact on the quality of life of persons near death, which can greatly impact public health and the comfort in dealing with our ultimate demise.