By Sarah Jane Tribble – Kaiser Health News
Medicare Advantage is government health insurance managed by private companies. Some find it lets them down after a serious diagnosis. (Story first aired on All Things Considered on January 3, 2023.)
Medicare Advantage is government health insurance managed by private companies. Some find it lets them down after a serious diagnosis. (Story first aired on All Things Considered on January 3, 2023.)
We’ve seen it so many times. A young, handsome man rushed into the emergency room with a gunshot wound. A flurry of white coats racing the clock: CPR, the heart zapper, the order for a scalpel. Stat! Then finally, the flatline.
This is Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider’s biggest pet peeve. Where are the TV scripts about the elderly grandmothers dying of heart failure at home? What about an episode on the daughter still grieving her father’s fatal lung cancer, ten years later?
“Acute, violent death is portrayed many, many, many times more than a natural death,” says Ungerleider, an internal medicine doctor and founder of End Well, a nonprofit focused on shifting the American conversation around death.
Don’t even get her started on all the miraculous CPR recoveries where …