End-of-life care in America

Guests: Ezekiel Emanuel, Justin Bekelman

End-of-life care in America can get a bad rap.  We imagine people living their final days in sterile hospital rooms hooked up to machines, receiving invasive and expensive treatments. But a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that end-of-life care in the U.S. isn’t always so bleak when compared to a number of European countries and Canada.  Today, two of the study authors come in to talk about end-of-life care in America — what we do well and what we need to improve.  EZEKIEL EMANUEL, chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy and an oncologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and JUSTIN BEKELMAN, associate professor of radiation oncology  and medical ethics and health policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.