Why paralysed Dan wants to die: bank wants his home and his money's run out
18 Apr, 2011 04:03 PM
Paralysed since the age of three, Dan Crews hoped that he would not live to see the day that his money ran out.
Now, with his house in foreclosure in Antioch, Illinois and a nursing agency threatening to sue, family members face the heart-wrenching prospect of moving the 27-year-old man into a nursing home.
As a quadriplegic, Crews cannot move his body from the neck down. He relies on a ventilator and needs around-the-clock care, which had been paid for through a trust fund established in 1992 after a $6 million personal injury settlement.
At the time, doctors believed that Crews would live no longer than 20 years. But he thrived under his family's loving care in a custom-designed home, and has out-lived his resources.
Family members fear that nursing home staff, no matter how well-intended, will not be able to provide adequate care.
Crews, who can speak and eat, needs the mechanical respirator to breathe for him, pushing air through a tracheostomy tube into his lungs.
"He's totally helpless," said Cheryl Crews, 61, who lives with her son and serves as his main caregiver. "His arms don't work. His legs don't work. You worry. I won't be able to watch over the people watching over him."
Crews says that what he fears most is dying in a nursing home. His financial troubles only exacerbate the lack of control he says he has over his life.
Last year, he was so distraught that he called hospices, lawyers and media outlets to ask if anyone would help him end his life.
He does not have the physical ability to unplug his ventilator, and no one else has been willing to do it for him.
Disability advocates say that it is usually less expensive to provide medical care at home, rather than at a nursing facility. Crews, though, needs 24-hour supervision because of his dependence on a ventilator.
He has spent at least $300,000 annually on nursing care in past years, and still faces more than $300,000 in unpaid medical bills. He must pay the state $500 per month in a Medicaid spend-down program that will qualify him for nursing home care after he loses or sells his assets - his property.
With his trust fund empty, he says his only income comes from a $1400 per month annuity.
"I thought I wouldn't live to see this," said Crews, who has stopped paying his mortgage. "It started to dawn on me last year that money was leaking out like a sieve. ... I will lose the one thing that makes my life tolerable, my privacy and my family."
http://www.hepburnadvocate.com.au/news/world/world/general/why-paralysed-dan-wan...Crews' mother said she doesn't want her son to die, but she supports his decisions. Doctors today say that he could live to be 40, she said.
"I can't imagine what it is like to live 24 years, not being able to get up, not having any privacy," said Cheryl Crews, who has a baby monitor in every room to be sure she hears the sound of her son's ventilator.
"He may not want to live, but he would like to die a certain way."
(full story in link)
And this is a SUPERIOR system to our OWN ?
Our "socialist" Medicare ?
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