Earl Blumenauer has a great piece in the New York Times right now, entitled My Near Death Panel Experience. He’s a Democrat representing Oregon in the House of Representatives, and helped to push for a provision to ensure that Medicare would cover the cost of one voluntary visit to discuss end-of-life issues, like living wills and such. Medicare currently does not cover this, but doctors on both sides of the aisle have said it’s really important.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because this provision would turn into a giant controversy about death panels and forced euthanasia of the elderly, neither of which are even tangentially related to the text’s actual purpose. The article is a neat perspective into what also happened, but also leaves me worried about where things will go from here.