Wakes? Who pays for those???

Wakes? Who pays for those??? I read Anne Moore's little and small minded essay, Harry and Louise Must Die on who should die already in Salon.com today. In this article where she says "hey let em die-it's cheaper", and to demonstrate her point about how it's better to just die at home,she has this blithe, romantic memory of her Irish-Catholic wakes as a younger (and possibly, softer-hearted, less selfish brat). Here's an excerpt if you don't want to read the whole article, some of which I do agree with to an extent, but that's not how it feels, Ms Moore. Maybe...maybe in your pampered, well-insured life. Ms Moore writes:

"Hospice focuses on comforting the terminally ill patient and family, at a health facility or at home, the last six months of life. If a terminally ill person in hospice stops breathing, they die. If their heart stops, they die. If they stop eating, they'll die within weeks...
If a terminally ill person who's hospitalized stops breathing, they're intubated. If their heart stops, they're resuscitated. Death is prevented, life is extended -- but the person is still terminally ill with cancer, or kidney disease, or heart disease or diseases of the brain....Why should we care which path people take? Well, it comes out of our pockets. Medicare is funded by Social Security payroll taxes, and 75 percent of those who die each year are 65 or older, enrolled in Medicare. If we died more gently, we'd cut spending."

AND THEN Ms Moore goes on to say..."When I was a little girl, I went with my family to a lot of wakes. Most of my very large family -- I have 50 first cousins -- lived within a few hours drive, from D.C. to Boston. French, Irish, Catholic: There were a lot of us, and some of us died. For three days and nights, we waked the dead. The coffin was open, and there was a stepped platform beside it, so little tykes like me could view the dead. I was never afraid: I thought the dead looked regal, laid out in their finest clothes, on a bed of off-white satin." - article link here too.

--Wow. Off-white satin...mmm how dreamy, romantic.

OK - but how to determine who is just terminally ill and who isn't just being a social burden - robbed of their economic contribution because of the LACK OF HEALTHCARE? [Dear Reader: A side note - I will be discussing this topic more in the near future]

Why don't we just kill all the undesirables in our beautiful, capitalistic society, where we talk and talk about healthcare costs, but no one questions even the price of an aspirin given in an emergency room. Why is that aspirin 400% more costly than the ones I buy at the store? If I had known it would be that expensive I'd make sure I carried some aspirin around with me so I could just eat one of my own. How come we can't control or even sometimes find out what healthcare costs??? Hospitals for profit are just as evil as prisons for profit, in my opinion. It encourages the rising costs (and the demand/need). Our government participates in this bullshit profiteering from misery, just as they have learned to do so well at war-profiteering. But I digressed, again, gentle reader.

SO, I posted this letter at www.Salon.com in response:

A little rant here about the idiot doctors who took 9 years to kill my 50 year old sister July 14th, a few weeks ago. The fact is that she probably would have been ok to begin with if she'd had healthcare or insurance. But after the first of many surgeries to cut bits of her intestines out that after what was supposed to be a "simple" hernia operation, turned into a 9 year odyssey of pain, humiliation, surgeries, cruel speculation on the doctors' part and their criticism of her body's inability to perform as they'd hoped, it took her ability and joy of working (she'd been many things but at the last a CNA, helping other old people into the good night). It left her as an expensive burden to the state, who got tired of paying to fix her and though she was on medicare and SSI, threatened her with a $89,000 hospital bill in June that would "ruin" her credit (she had none by then having lost her 5 acres and home years before because they f**ked up and she could no longer work), but they succeeded in scaring her into believing that this bill would be used to throw her out of her Sec 8 housing (no doubt needed by somebody else economically ruined by lack of healthcare) and told her that the bill would be "paid for by Hospice" (I'd really like to see that check they wrote), if she would agree to sign up with Hospice, who would helpfully setup a hospital bed in her Sec 8 house where she could be fretted over by her 19 year and 21 year old daughters, and her grieving, lovable husband who at 67 had no real education/career or contribution to society and no real reason to exist in this world other than he loved my sister (the country mouse in our family). Then as I (the city mouse), living in Dallas, was finding out about this, she was given enough liquid morphine to mess her head up and I couldn't get through to her that there was nothing that those people could take from her (she was, as they they say, 'judgment proof' having nothing left to lose) and then *poof!*, she died in her sleep a few weeks later [added for emphasis]. Of what did she die, you ask? Lack of healthcare? Ignorance in backwater Ky? Lungs gave out? Intestinal failure? NOPE- Hospice says she "must have a had an aneurysm - of course there was no autopsy. In fact Hospice helpfully had my sister cremated within 6 hours of her death. She didn't have life insurance. It had been cancelled long ago with her work ability and then she was too sick to get any. I nor anyone else in our families had the mucho bucks to have her embalmed or preserved long enough to have a wake. Was in fact told, no funeral home in the state of Ky (!?!) had a refrigerator to hold her long enough for me to try to raise the funds to have a modest wake/service before I could travel there from here in Texas.

[WTF? --not in my posting but geez...I would have liked to have seen her again. But it was more efficient to just burn her at no cost to the family, of course. I'm surprised they let us have the ashes back.]

That little romantic remembrance of wakes, made me wonder if we are gonna kill the poor quicker, can they at least provide better funerary services? Surely it can't really COST that much, can it?