ICU stay before death common in the U.S.

There is no law or regulation in the US (that I'm aware of -- I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong) that requires physicians or hospitals to provide care they consider futile; and clients and families have the right to decline any offered treatment they choose, but they can't make physicians or hospitals provide care or treatment that isn't clinically indicated -- but everyone goes along because they're scared of getting sued. It's a sad situation.

Hospitals and physicians today (in the US) could refuse to admit people to ICUs and refuse to code people (and refuse to do lots of other things) -- they just don't.

So do many, many other people -- why single her and her family out?

Because Arnold is all about budget cuts, and eliminating waste in healthcare. When his family became involved in a health care crisis, he could have been a model as to why ICU is not an appropriate place for a dying 87 year old woman. He could have to be the poster boy on appropriate care when elders die.

When it became obvious that care on my 47 yo husband was futile, I asked that he be taken off the vent. At that point, no one had even mentioned DNR or that he was dying. I thought about what it would take to keep him alive-g tube, trach etc, and realized how much it would cost as well as the impact on our family (our kids were 9 and 10). And I knew the end result was that he would still die an early death.

U.S. hospital patients more likely to visit ICU before dying

People who die in a U.S. hospital are nearly five times as likely as their counterparts in England to have spent part of their final hours in an intensive care unit (ICU).

What's more, over the age of 85, ICU usage among terminal patients is eight times higher in the U.S. than in England.

Intensive care services are expensive and labor intensive, Dr. Hannah Wunsch, an anesthesiologist and intensive care doctor at Columbia University Hospital in New York noted in an interview with Reuters Health.

Intensive care is "painful, it's distressing, it's noisy, and it's upsetting to patients and families to be in ICU. It's not something you want if the outcome is not going to be favorable," Wunsch said.

Full Story: http://www.reuters.com/article/healt...59M57H20091023

I believe it is a personal choice and my choice is DNR no heroic procedures. That being said are we willing to make that choice for everyone? I hope not, as healthcare professionals; We should advocate for our pts. This choice will be taken away if we get government health care AKA OBAMACARE. I urge all of you that want to give tour pts and family a choice help stop OBAMACARE today. You can flame away but when the public option is the only plan availabile to you because your employer decided to save the most money by choosing the least expensive plan and the other companies are nolonger providing coverage due to no profit in the market.

There is no law or regulation in the US (that I'm aware of -- I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong) that requires physicians or hospitals to provide care they consider futile; and clients and families have the right to decline any offered treatment they choose, but they can't make physicians or hospitals provide care or treatment that isn't clinically indicated -- but everyone goes along because they're scared of getting sued. It's a sad situation.

Hospitals and physicians today (in the US) could refuse to admit people to ICUs and refuse to code people (and refuse to do lots of other things) -- they just don't.