What guidance do the video and reading provide for how to balance care and cost at the end of life?
The video discusses this failure in how hospital balance care and cost at end of life. In the video, we get to hear from Meredith Snedeker who talks about how hospitals often perform “extraordinary measures” (The Costs of Dying: End-of-Life-Care 4:50) In other words, they provide unnecessary care at exorbitant cost. Meredith explains that “there were 25 specialists who attended to her mother, each of whom billed Medicare separately” (The Costs of Dying: End-of-Life-Care 5:25). Many of the tests they performed were meaningless. One such example was a “pap smear, which is generally only recommended for much younger women” (The Costs of Dying:
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If this idea were to be applied, cost would go down and quality of care could possibly also go up.
Something else to consider when balancing is autonomy of choice. The reading mentions this also, that “if patients are able to make their own decisions about treatments and express them to others, their free and informed decision should be honored” (Caring for People at the End of Life 10). But the reality is, according to the video, a patient’s choice is not being fully respected.
To prove this further, we see this happen in the video’s case study. According to the video, Meredith Snedeker’s mother “though she received $40,000 worth of care in her last two months of life, not one of her 25 doctors sat down with Dorothy Glass and her family and discussed how she wanted to die” (The Costs of Dying: End-of-Life-Care 12:39). In other words, another reform in the goal to balance cost and care could be to simply ask the patient what she or he