Question

List all of the key points for the patient determination act. Describe in detail the components of each act.

Answer 1

Ans) The Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA), passed in 1990 and instituted on December 1, 1991, encourages all people to make choices and decisions now about the types and extent of medical care they want to accept or refuse should they become unable to make those decisions due to illness.

- The PSDA requires all health care agencies (hospitals, long-term care facilities, and home health agencies) receiving Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to recognize the living will and power of attorney for health care as advance directives.

- The PSDA does not create new rights for patients but reaffirms the common-law right of self-determination as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

- Under the PSDA, health care agencies must ask you whether you have advance directives and must provide you with educational materials about your rights under state law.

- The purpose of the Patient Self-Determination Act was/is to inform patients of their rights regarding decisions toward their own medical care, and ensure that these rights are communicated by the health care provider.

- Specifically, the rights ensured are those of the patient to dictate their future care (by means such as living will or power of attorney), should they become incapacitated.

- The goals of the "purpose" of the Patient Self-Determination Act are/were:

(1) to prevent cruel over treatment of elderly/disabled Medicare/Medicaid patients for the profit motive.

(2) to save money for Medicare and the private insurers in the form of the reduction of end-of-life costs for Medicare and the private insurers when elderly Medicare/Medicaid patients would ELECT/CHOOSE to refuse expensive ICU/CCU life-extending or life-saving treatments in the hospital in order to shorten their suffering unto a certain death.

- It was envisioned by the framers of the 1991 PSDA that the elderly/disabled on Medicare/Medicaid would die less expensively and more comfortably (out of pain) on the palliative care/Hospice Medicare Entitlement in their own personal residence or in the setting of a residential nursing home when the treating physicians consulted with them about their terminal diagnoses.