My Mother's Death Panel

My acid test of health care reform is how it will make my family’s life better. I’ve told many stories about my late mother, a real character. She died of cancer almost five years ago. She lived at Wesley Woods, a HUD 202 facility in Atlanta. She was a volunteer there for years. She moved in – her decision – within a year after my daddy died. She was lonely.
 
Mother’s cancer was rare and difficult. Multiple surgeries, experimental drugs, tended by compassionate geriatricians and oncologists, nurses who came to her apartment without compensation, her great-great niece Ashley, a pediatric ICU nurse who spent three nights per week at the Towers, her great nephew Steve, a staff member who did chores (probably on a cash basis, but I’m not sure), and Chaplain Woody. And there were numerous friends like Doris, Peggy and Lynn. And she had my wife Kathleen and me. Kathleen stayed close in Atlanta, while I lived in Washington, D.C. Our own long-distance caregiving story.
 
Mother was middle-class poor. She worked for the county government for 40 years. She earned a couple of thousand dollars a month in retirement and Social Security and had $130,000 in the bank after selling her house and receiving the payouts from my late father's insurance policies.
 
She had Medicare Part A, took advantage of Medicare Part B (a voluntary opt-out program) and supplemental insurance offered by the county. She had a car, which she sold when driving became difficult and the upkeep a strained expense. The sale put $3,000 in her bank account.
 
Mother died at Emory Hospital while living at Wesley Woods. Of course, we had to think about the prospect of nursing home care. Fortunately, she had enough to pay for the great care she would have received at Budd Terrace or A.G. Rhodes at Wesley Woods. When that money ran out, she had too much income for Medicaid at the time in Georgia, so my wife and I would have supplemented. That made me rehearse in my mind about difficult choices of state school tuition for my sons instead of private college tuition versus nursing home care for Mother. Fortunately, we didn’t have to make those choices, but we did have bigger choices to make.
 
The bigger choices: how aggressively does the cancer get treated at various stages? Who decides?
 
A few years earlier, my mother, father, wife and I decided to update our wills, living wills and durable powers of attorney. Mother and Daddy switched their care to a couple of wonderful geriatricians at Wesley Woods, who gave them great attention and wise counsel. We had the same attorney, an old friend, help us draw up the documents. Mother and Daddy had different ideas about the conditions related to aggressive treatment, but both agreed that final decisions would rest on my shoulders if they were unable to decide. Before their lives were over (he died of heart disease), both documents had to be invoked so my father could avoid aggressive/liability-driven treatment at a local emergency room, and my mother could be comfortable with clinical quality versus quantity of life as she faced the inevitable.
 

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