In my lifetime, I’ve watched hundreds, possibly thousands, of people die on television. While some of these emanated from news coverage at home and abroad, most were fictionalized versions of what death is supposed to look like. Mostly quick. Some Painful. For the most part, unexpected.
Yet, none have touched me more than watching the death of a woman suffering from the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s in HBO’s new Jack Kevorkian biopic “You Don’t Know Jack.” As you can imagine by the subject matter, this woman’s death was neither unexpected nor especially painful.
“Tell me when to flip the switch,” the woman says determinedly to Dr. Kevorkian from a VW van in a woodland setting amid the tubes and solutions of the good doctor’s suicide machine. “Whenever you’re rea…” and before Kevorkian can finish she pulls the plug on the life-ending cocktail. “Thank-you,” she replies softly. And then there is nothing.
It is quick. It is sad. But, for me, it is elegant.
The film is nothing, if not timely. While conservative ideologues talk of the costs of health care, for too long many have ignored the financial and emotional costs of dying in this country.
It won’t surprise you that 100 percent of all Americans will eventually expire, yet the amount of money being spent to keep us alive towards the end should. In 2008, Medicare paid $50 billion just for doctor and hospital bills during the last two months of patients’ lives—a figure that’s more than the budget of the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of Education. Of that, its estimated 20 to 30 percent of these medical payouts had no meaningful impact. And yet, for all of the public’s lobbying to cut costs and deficits, most of these bills are paid for with few or no questions asked.
Even though a vast majority of Americans say they want to die at home, 75 percent die in a hospital or a nursing home. In some cases, it costs up to $10,000 a day to maintain someone in the intensive care unit. Some patients exist in this condition for weeks or even months. Many times they have to be sedated so they don’t reflexively pull out a tube or other IV; sometimes they’re even restrained. Surely not the way most of us would want to spend our final days.
While you would think the president’s recent health reform legislation would rein in these types of expenditures, it is obvious now to anyone who watched the news during the health reform process, with its talk of death panels and reforms allowing too much choice, that for those who face their constituents in elections, either in 2010 or 2012, the issue is too politically explosive to touch–even when it threatens to bankrupt the country. And again, we must take matters into our own hands.
“You Don’t Know Jack,” touches on the beginnings of this partisan issue du jour, opening as a then 61-year old former pathologist Jack Kevorkian launches his crusade to bring what he believes is a humane and dignified option for the terminally-ill: assisted suicide. Set two decades ago, the film brings these topics back to life, and front and center, for an American public who may have forgotten the story of Terri Schiavo but are more enmeshed than ever in the polarized political and moral environment her end-of-life case aroused. Images of average Americans, just like you and me, facing the symptoms of neurological disorders, degenerative illness, and severe pain, interviewing with the man known as “Dr. Death,” all wanting the same thing: a choice.
I know people may disagree on their time. Death is a tough thing to talk about.
So don’t.
I’ll be putting my wishes in writing tonight. Or, at least, as much as the law will allow me them.
Posted on April 24, 2010
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