“Last Friday night, my father asked me to kill him.”
Keith Olbermann opened his emotional Special Comment on health care Wednesday with the story of his father’s six-month-long hospitalization suffering through a colon removal, pneumonia, kidney failure, liver failure, and many infections.  

After a particularly difficult week, Olbermann said he went into his father’s hospital room to [...]

 [BBC] A former BBC presenter is being investigated in Britain after admitting he killed his lover.
Ray Gosling said the man he killed was suffering from Aids and in great pain.
Ray Gosling was arrested on Tuesday after he told a BBC documentary that he smothered the man. The admission and investigation has added to an already [...]

[ChicagoTribune] If ever Carol Gaetjens becomes unconscious with no hope of awakening, even if she could live for years in that state, she says she wants her loved ones to discontinue all forms of artificial life support.  But now there’s a catch for this churchgoing Catholic woman. U.S. bishops have decided that it is not [...]

[dailymail] A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them [...]

[Special to The Birmingham News]  At the end of December 2000 on a cold night, my brother Bob called.
“Dad’s not doing very well,” he said. “If you want to see him before he dies, you’d better fly up here.”
I didn’t believe him. At age 88, my dad had weathered crises before, and he had told [...]

Total health care expenses for Americans age 45 to 64 in 2006 ($370 billion) were about double the inflation-adjusted total for 1996 ($187 billion), according to the latest News and Numbers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. AHRQ’s study covers all Americans age 45 to 64 other than those residing in nursing homes [...]

Step aside Jack Kevorkian, there’s a new “Dr. Death” in town.
Ten years after the notorious Michigan doctor was ultimately jailed for killing a patient — one of 130 he helped die through lethal injection — Philip Nitschke, a new renegade physician, is spreading the gospel of assisted suicide — and he’s coming to the United [...]

[EurekaAlert] A growing number of hospitalized adults are incapable of making their own health decisions, but little research has explored how doctors feel about making medical decisions with a patient’s surrogate decision maker.
A study published in the September 2009 issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine found that one in five doctors are not [...]

Official guidelines are causing a crisis in care of the terminally ill and growing anger among patients’ families, medical experts say.
[BBC] The advice allows food and fluids to be withdrawn from patients, who are then continuously sedated, if they are judged to be close to death.
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph the six doctors [...]

[AMNews] Doctors are right to advise an end to feeding for pediatric patients in a persistent vegetative state and some other circumstances, the association says.
For nearly two decades, the medical and legal consensus has been that it is permissable to withdraw life-sustaining artificial hydration and nutrition from adult patients in a persistent vegetative state. But [...]