Daily Kos Diary: Sad, But Boy, Does It Home For Me!

This is a sad story that reminds all too painfully of what two of my relatives went through before they died.
Both of my relatives had a terminal condition that called for hospice care in the hours (in one case) and months (in the other) before they died.
The story I saw today in Daily Kos had an eeringly similar ring. Sadly (due to my own stupidity), I made some careless mistakes with some of the site's buttons, something that prevented me from recommending his diary on the Kos site.
Really, however, this well-written piece struck home in many ways, not only reminding me of what my two relatives went through, but also of the efforts by right-wing disinformation specialists to defame the whole concept of hospice care by parroting outright lies about how President Obama's healthcare proposal calls for the "euthanizing" of seniors and others.
The beginning of the diary captured my thoughts:

My Dad was a great guy: quiet, hardworking, honest, and kind. He drove a dump-truck for a road construction company, and was a card-carrying Teamster for most of his working life. He died last night at around 6:30 PM, less than two weeks after my Mom passed away in the hospital after a short illness. So let me tell you that when it comes to health care in the United States, Medicare, and hospice care, I know up-close-and-personal how badly our system needs to be reformed. And, to be honest, I have been ranting about this from time to time over the last two weeks, never intending to turn any of my thoughts into a diary here. (I usually just post about food safety law here.) But when I saw the most recent lies and inanities from Sarah Palin, when she said that "parents...will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care," I knew that I had to say something here, especially about end-of-life planning and hospice care.

The last words of this beginning couldn't have been clearer about what we're really talking about. We're talking about hospice care, something that can be most valuable for families with loved ones having to deal with terminal conditions and their aftermath.
What Sarah Palin talked about was an outright lie. There's NONE of what Palin claimed was in the bill.
What was really in the bill was what this Daily Kos diarist described in all too vivid detail.
I sympathize with the diarist entirely, and I'm more determined to see that the right-wing intimidation and disinformation machine get thrown out of business for good and that real healthcare reform with a robust public option get passed by Congress once it convenes again.