What A Difference A Month Makes: Gingrich Makes A U-Turn On End-Of-Life Care
On August 19, 2009, Newt Gingrich wrote a column for HumanEvents.com on how end-of-life counseling helped his father-in-law but should not be made available to all Americans...which is interesting because in July of 2009 he was a proponent of making end-of-life counseling available to all Medicare recipients.
In the column, Newt Gingrich described how his father-in-law benefited from advance planning through end-of-life counseling with his doctors, how he would like all Americans to benefit from that experience, and how he doesn't want the government involved.
But as recently as July 2009, the former Speaker was singing the praises of end-of-life counseling:
Gundersen Lutheran Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin has developed a successful end-of-life, best practice that combines: 1) community-wide advance care planning, where 90 percent of patients have advance directives; 2) hospice and palliative care; and 3) coordination of services through an electronic medical record. The Gundersen approach empowers patients and families to control and direct their care...
If Gundersen's approach was used to care for the approximately 4.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who die every year, Medicare could save more than $33 billion a year.
Now that it's August, Gingrich does not seem to notice that to provide wide-spread end-of-life counseling, Medicare, as a government funded program, would have to accept additional federal funds.
The House bill ensures all American seniors have access to professional, medical counseling that is paid for by Medicare. The counseling will be provided by a medical professional - not a government bureaucrat or panel of some kind.
Gingrich is clearly throwing all human decency into the wind: he either doesn't want the end-of-life counseling his father-in-law received to be made available to all Americans or he does believe the counseling would help and is ignoring that fact for political gain.
So what has changed? Gingrich calls this provision "a political football," but last month he was for end-of-life counseling and now he's against it, evidently for no reason other than it's supported by Democrats.
Gingrich's sudden shift on this issue reveals his true nature as a political opportunist. Last month, he thought that encouraging counseling would benefit him. This month, he is siding with the other Republicans who are fighting this provision with tooth and nail. Who knows what will "benefit" him next month.
