Funding End-of-Life Counseling from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Under a new policy starting next month, the government will pay doctors to discuss options for end-of-life care with their patients, which may include advance directives -- instructions on how aggressively to continue medical treatment if the patient is too incapacitated to decide for themselves. Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Center for nonpartisan research on bioethics and public policy, and author of Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care; and Trudy Lieberman, contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review, discuss the new measure. Download the podcast here.