Art Buchwald Quotes

Being in the hospice didn't work out exactly the way I had expected. By all rights, I should have finished my time here in mid-March 2006 - at least, that's when Medicare stopped paying.

From routine hospital visits and prescription drugs, to emergencies and hospice care, Medicare covers the full range of health services that our nation's seniors rely on every single day.

I am proposing that every person over sixty-five years of age be spared the darkness of sickness without hope.

A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.

Today, Medicare provides health insurance to about 40 million seniors and disabled individuals each year. The number is only expected to grow as the baby boomers begin retiring.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

Americans of all ages deserve quality end-of-life medical care.

A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn't pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.

I've written and passed laws to give Medicare beneficiaries access to life saving cancer drugs and to ensure that seniors don't have to give up the prospect of a cure when they go into hospice care.

Do you really want to pay for surgeon’s salaries by not having low-income people not be able to afford health insurance?

I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.

I would urge the government to allocate more funds toward fighting cancer. My own situation, it made me think. It made me think about the potential of dying. I wouldn't say I was scared. I'm more scared of how it will happen than of it happening. I'm not scared that I'm going to die. I think of how I'm going to die ... I don't want to linger. That scares me a little. The idea of lingering.

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

My grandmother made dying her life's work.

My dad's dying wish was to have his family around him. I can't help thinking he would have been better off with more oxygen.

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

But we have gone so far in the direction of over treating terminal patients that we've failed to recognize when we're doing more harm than good.

When one has not long to live, why shouldn't one have fancies?

My patients taught me not how to die, but how to live.

The evidence is that people who enter hospice don't have shorter lives. In many cases they are longer.

Dying is not easy. It's a very hard transition.

Life is an incurable condition: the only known treatment is to try to keep the patient comfortable.

Have a conversation with your family about your end-of-life wishes while you are healthy. No one wants to have that discussion... but if you do, you'll be giving your loved ones a tremendous gift, since they won't have to guess what your wishes would have been, and it takes the onus of responsibility off of them.

Short-term can be terminal.