Thousands in NC plan for death

The issue of end-of-life planning regularly creates emotional debate, as in the case of Terry Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida resident who died in 2005, and in the current controversy about a U.S. House proposal to pay doctors through Medicare for talks with willing patients about how they want their lives to end.

In North Carolina, the issue was hotly debated in 2007, when the legislature voted after bruising debate to revise end-of-life forms to provide more detailed choices for people planning ahead.

Since then, according to state records, thousands of people have made the decision to spell out advance choices about how they should be treated as their final days near. Nursing homes, hospitals, hospices and other institutions have asked the state for more than 390,000 end-of-life forms.

And about a dozen people each business day add their advance health-care choices in the form of documents that spell out what kinds of end-of-life care they want under specific conditions. Those are added to a separate online database of about 15,000 maintained by the office of Secretary of State Elaine Marshall. Total annual filings to the Advance Health Care Directive Registry are up nearly 50 percent during the last five years, state records show.

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