It has been over a year since I posted to my Blog. A lot has happened since then. Some things good and some things bad. My work has dealt with cases in the US, Chile, Ecuador, China, Columbia and Peru over the last year. However, I did not travel to any of these countires during the year. Instead, I just completed desk-top analyses due to travel restrictions and personal restraints.
My mother passed away in April this year. She was just shy of her 89th birthday and Mom and Dad were married 69 years and 4 months at the time.
Unfortunately, it was necessary to place her in an Assisted Living facility back in November. This was an eye-opening experience to see the waste and abuse that permeates the medical system here in the US due to regulations in Medicare and the Affordable Care Act which has resulted in the consolidation of doctor offices into franchises owned by large corporate medical companies. What I saw due to this experience was:
- The system is setup by Government Bureaucrats so that Hospice and Home Care programs promotes or entices the elderly to die and not to provide quality end-of-life care.
- There seems to be a lack of doctors or real medical care in these programs. No MD ever evaluated my Mom from September until we pulled her from the program and took her to the Hospital just a few hours before her death. The doctor (MD) in charge of the hospice program just let a nurse practitioner evaluate her conditions and make recommendations for him to sign-off.
- There is a lack of skilled nursing and qualified help in this country. We had Mom in what was supposed to be one of the best care facilities in her town and yet we had to provide for most of her daily care due to the lack of staff. Many of the other facilities we considered had less staff than the one we chose.
- The professional care takers that were assigned to Mom had to maximize the number of patients to bill Medicare. This in turn minimized the time spent they could spend with Mom. Most of them that we dealt with were very compassionate people but had limited time to help her as they had a bunch of other patients that they were also assigned to assist.
- Rather than addressing health issues and working with her confusion due to worsening dementia, they insisted on prescribing anti-anxiety drugs which turned her into a zombie in order to make her compliant without any real awareness of people, things going on around her, or the ability to express her needs. Several times I had to insist they terminate the medication resulting in a Mom we were familar with.
I could go on about the poor experience I had with Mom and her end-of-life care. Needless to say, I am still grieving over her loss so I will quit for now. However, it did reveal to me that Government regulations and intervention in our health care system has many negative consequences.