Tracking ‘Death Panels’ to Their Wisconsin Roots

Published On: September 5th, 2009

wisconsin Attention has been paid previously to La Crosse, Wis., and the work done there urging patients to focus on their end-of-life care while they are still healthy. But the Washington Post today, under the headline “The Unwitting Birthplace of the ‘Death Panel’ Myth,” takes a detailed look at what started in La Crosse resulted in controversy for health-overhaul efforts.

After starting to push local attention to end-of-life issues as far back as the mid-1980s, La Crosse’s Gundersen Lutheran Health System more recently set out to change the federal rules to reward end-of-life planning, the paper notes. It continues:

The hospital got its wish this spring when House Democrats inserted that provision into their health-care reform bill — only to see former Alaska governor Sarah Palin seize on it as she warned about “death panels” that would deny care to the elderly and the disabled. Despite widespread debunking, those warnings have led lawmakers to say they will drop the provision.

The death-panel characterizations and the uproar they caused have deflected attention from the issue Gundersen wanted to highlight. “It’s really distressing,” hospital official Bud Hammes tells the WaPo. “These things need to be addressed.”

La Crosse factoid: More than 90% of people in town have directives covering end-of-life treatment, double the national average, according to the paper.

Image: iStockphoto

Original post:
Tracking ‘Death Panels’ to Their Wisconsin Roots

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