Opinion: Helping patients and doctors talk about death

Medicare announced plans this month to reimburse doctors for talking with patients about what treatments they want — and don't want — toward the end of life. This sensible, long-overdue proposal is likely to have a very wide impact. About 80 percent of people who die in the United States each year are covered by Medicare, and Medicare policies are often followed by private insurers, some of which already pay for these advance-planning conversations. The need for such talks was made even clearer by disturbing new evidence in a study in the July 9 issue of JAMA Oncology, a journal of the American Medical Association, that many cancer patients, who often face difficult choices over whether to have chemotherapy or radiation, don't receive the care they want at the end of life.