"TIME" Magazine Writer Pens Piece and Caring for Aging Parents
O'BRIEN: Welcome back, everybody. Joe Klein is coming up as our next guest, and he is autographing Margaret's book for her. That's</s>CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.</s>ROMANS (voice-over): In Syria, government forces shelling the town of Houla, site of last week's massacre that killed more than a hundred people, nearly half of them children. The slaughter of civilians has sparked global outrage. Meantime, Syria's main rebel group, the Free Syrian Army, is giving the government a Friday deadline to pull out of occupied cities and villages, unless, humanitarian aide in. Now, they're not saying what will happen if, as expected, President Bashar al-Assad ignores that ultimatum? Will we see a verdict in the John Edwards trial today? Jurors begin day nine of deliberation this morning. The judge decided to send four alternate jurors home. They are the ones who got attention for matching T-shirts. Edwards faces up to 30 years behind bars for allegedly using nearly $1 million in illegal campaign donations to cover up an extramarital affair. Newly discovered audio recordings of Charles Manson's right-hand man could help police solve cold case murders. Los Angeles police are fast to get their hands on eight hours of conversations between Manson family killer Charles Tex Watson and his attorney, conversations from 1969. A judge ruled to give them the tapes originally off limits because of attorney-client privilege. Police believe the recordings capture Watson talking about unknown murders the Manson family committed. Manson is serving a life sentence for seven murders. An Illinois lawmaker loses it on the state house floor. The shocking video goes viral. Republican State Representative Mike Bost flipped out after Democrats pushed a last minute bill to reform the state's pension system.</s>BOST: This is not the American way. These damn bills that come out here all the damn time, come out here at the last second. I got to try to figure out how to vote for my people. You should be ashamed of yourselves! I'm sick of it. Every year we give power to one person! Enough!</s>ROMANS: That tirade went on for a minute and a half. Bost even tried to drop the mic but it was attached to the podium. All right, this just in, 383,000 unemployment claims were filed for the first time last week. That's more than expected and the previous week was revised up as well below the 400,000 level that shows an improving labor market. Is it time to say good-bye to wearing ties? Multibillionaire and Virgin CEO Richard Branson says yes. He's made it his life-long mission to stop people from wearing ties going so far as to carry scissors in his pockets to cut people's ties off. Branson says they serve no useful purpose. He says "Being comfortable and confident in what you are wearing helps people come up with more innovative and original thoughts. It's a little thing but it can make all of the difference." Soledad?</s>O'BRIEN: I like a man in a tie, got to tell you.</s>O'BRIEN: I'm not responsible for the shots that we take.</s>CAIN: Richard Branson and are on the same page. Nothing about a fancy cloth makes your thoughts more formal or you a better worker. It was designed at a time to show that you could afford a piece of fancy cloth.</s>HILL: I like that, will.</s>O'BRIEN: Let's turn to what is really a challenging topic. As I was reading Joe Klein's cover story, I saw the story of my parents unfold the same way. The question is figuring out how do you care for an elderly parent who is dying. It's clearly tough for any kid, but Joe Klein tells his personal story in "TIME" magazine, the tough road that he faced as he managed for his parents in the final months of their lives and the solution he found that made the process a little bit easier. Nice to have you with us. I thought you story is just -- I felt, yes that happened to us. So many will read this cover story in "TIME" and say this is the story of my elderly parents starting to fall apart and me having to now take care of them. How hard was it to write this?</s>JOE KLEIN, "TIME" MAGAZINE: This is the way one grieves. Only a geek like me could find policy implications of his parents' death. In a way, I don't know what it was like for you, but going through cartons full of memorabilia and thinking through their past and seeing pictures of my mom and dad when they were young and finding that my mom when she was 17 years old looked exactly like my daughter. It was just the perfect way to end a difficult process.</s>CAIN: Can I just ask this question? I took this away from your piece. I've said it, my parents have said it to me -- I don't want to be a vegetable. Pull the plug on me, as though there is a bright line or a point at which that decision becomes obvious. That wasn't the case for you.</s>KLEIN: It should have been obvious. I made the wrong decision. I was out in Iowa on one of my road trips. I was in Senator Chuck Grassley's kitchen from mom's doctor saying she's got pneumonia and she's not eating. You're going to lose her if you don't put in a feeding tube. I didn't want to lose her overnight. I wanted my brother in Asia to have an opportunity to be there as well. And so we put in the feeding tube even though I later learned she had another month to live without it.</s>O'BRIEN: You had a struggle moving your parents into this assisted living facility. There is this model. It's a model that you love. I think more than like it. You really think it gave your parents dignity and assistance that they need. Describe the model for us.</s>KLEIN: It's like Mayo Clinic. It takes care of 2.6 million people in central Pennsylvania in 44 counties. The big difference is that they pay doctors by salaries plus performance bonuses. Most doctors are paid fee-for-service, according to the procedures that they do and tests they run and so on. And so when I moved my parents from traditional fee-for-service medicine into a nursing home that used these doctors and nurses, all of a sudden three big things started happening. One, people stopped sticking needles in my parents and doing things to them. Number two, the care became coordinated.</s>O'BRIEN: Case manager, which is really a critical thing when parents are sick.</s>KLEIN: Rather than having a whole flotilla of doctors all doing separate things sometimes conflicting things, you had one person in charge. And the third thing was -- and this is most important to me -- they started talking to me as if I were an adult. They started in a calm, humane, decent way, they told me the truth about the choices that I faced with my parents.</s>O'BRIEN: What's the pushback on that system? Many doctors say that they don't like it.</s>KLEIN: The pushback is that, first of all, doctors are like high priests. My wife comes from a family of doctors all of the way out to second cousins. We know about this. And they want to make every last decision. What Geisinger has done brilliantly is to use electronic records over the course of the last 15 years to figure out what actually works and what doesn't. And your performance bonus depends on how closely you adhere to the processes that they found actually work. Doctors don't like to have that hanging over them. They also don't like to not do things because they are afraid of malpractice suits. And finally, they get rewarded for doing the extra x-ray or extra MRI or blood test. And what Geisinger found is when they started this case manager system, which is essentially having a nurse, they added a layer of bureaucracy. And it's having a nurse call the elderly person or visit them three or four times a week, which, as you know, elderly people like to talk about their health a lot. And when you do that, all of a sudden visits to the hospital decline 20 percent, revisits to the hospital decline 36 percent, and it cost seven percent less. So if we were able to institute this kind of system having salary doctors rather than fee-for-service doctors in Medicare, we could save an awful lot of money.</s>O'BRIEN: I think this cover story is really a combination of sort of compassion 101 in dealing with a terrible time in your life as the son and in your parents' life as people are afraid and confused, and then also the policy around how we could solve a major problem in this country, which is the spiraling cost of health care.</s>KLEIN: Right. It doesn't get rid of all of the difficult stuff. My dad thought that old age was a reversible condition. I had to take away his driver's license and then I had to hide his car keys. And then I had to explain to him four different times why he was going into the nursing home. And there he started his own private occupy the elevator movement trying to get out.</s>KLEIN: But in the end, you know, he had -- he was a difficult guy. And we had some really fine moments at the end. And he died with dignity and when you're a human death panel, as I was for five months, that's the best you could ask, that they go peacefully, quietly, and serenely.</s>O'BRIEN: Joe Klein, cover story in "TIME" magazine beautifully written and you learn a lot about policy of health care and model that might be a good solution. Nice to have you. Thanks for talking with us. Still ahead on STARTING POINT, a supersized smack down. New York City's mayor trying to ban sugary drinks from restaurants and movie theaters and ballparks. The controversy, we're talking about it up next. You're watching STARTING POINT.