Socialized Health Care: Backdoor Euthanasia

I wrote in a previous article about problems associated with the UK Socialized health care program, in particular a program instituted to save money, the “Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).  The LCP was initially instituted to care for patients close to death, to make their last days as painless as possible but,  like most programs that the government controls, it  has morphed into a cost control  “pathway” to dispose of the elderly through “backdoor euthanasia.” 

But now we learn that not only the elderly are being put on a “pathway” to death but sick babies are also being eliminated to save money.  One doctor, in particular, wrote an article in the British Medical Journal describing his agony on watching the protracted deaths of babies through starvation and dehydration in the neonatal unit of one hospital.

Survival is often much longer than most  physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time  from  withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days. Parents and care teams are unprepared for the  sometimes severe changes that  they will witness in the child’s physical  appearance as severe  dehydration ensues.  I know the unique horror of  witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life  that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their  baby.  As a doctor, I struggle with the emotional  burden of accompanying the patient and his or her family through this  experience, as much as with the philosophical details of it. . .”

The LCP – on which 130,000 elderly and  terminally-ill adult patients die each year – is now the subject of an  independent inquiry ordered by ministers.  The investigation, which will include child  patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway  targets have influenced doctors’ decisions.

Hospitals are paid millions to hit targets for the number of patients who die on the Liverpool Care Pathway.  The incentives have been paid to hospitals that ensure a set percentage of patients who die on their wards have been put on the controversial regime. In some cases, hospitals have been set targets that between a third and two thirds of all the deaths should be on the LCP, which critics say is a way of hastening the deaths of terminally ill patients. At least £30million in extra money from taxpayers is estimated to have been handed to hospitals over the past three years to achieve these goals.

Medical critics of the LCP insist it is  impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes  a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear  hospital beds and save the NHS money.

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse,  has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the  use of death pathways for children.   She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a  very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom  they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult  to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after  being taken off the pathway.  I have also seen children die in terrible  thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.  ‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer  die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give  him liquids by tube. His death was agonizing for him, and for us nurses to  watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.”

The UK’s socialized health care system is bleeding red ink.   Long waiting periods for routine surgeries such as knee and hip replacements are  the norm. More serious procedures can take months just to get on a schedule.  People here often envy stories from Americans of how we can get quick  appointments with our primary care physicians, noting they often have to wait  weeks just for an appointment and then even longer for treatment. There are  legions of stories reported by the newspapers of people who have died while  waiting for surgery.  Thousands of elderly patients are dying being denied  live saving surgery based, not only on their age, but on the NHS’s $10 billion efficiency drive (to cut costs).

Obama and his minions of death have attempted to  down play  talk of waiting times, increased bureaucracy and  most of all, rationing, to control costs. But all of that – and more – is  occurring now throughout the UK and if it isn’t working among  countries  like Canada,  England, Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland, why would anyone think it could  work better in America, which has a much larger population?

But, if you are one of the delusional who believe the U.S. government has done a fine job with Medicare and  Medicaid, which are facing the same pressures and unsustainable costs as the  NHS, you are going to love ObamaCare.

American health care is not  yet British health care but,  if Democrats get their way, this country will rush to adopt a system much like the one that is killing people in Great Britain.  A nationalized health care system, no matter how it’s tailored, will collapse like other socialist programs.  Government-run health care may at times look like it works, but it is unsustainable — and deadly.

Consider the British hospital trust that was the focus of a recently completed independent inquiry. According to U.K. media reports, the review found that at least 400 and as many as 1,200 patients died from 2005 to 2008 because of poor care by Mid Staffordshire National Health Service Foundation Trust, which operates two hospitals. …The inquiry also noted “serious departures from the standard of basic care which every patient is entitled to expect,” abuses of elderly patients, and the too-common presence of unwashed patients and bedding “soiled with urine and feces for considerable periods of time.” Other sanitation problems included the presence of blood, discarded needles and used dressings. These problems shouldn’t be unexpected.

Last year, the media reported that up to 10,000 cancer patients were dying needlessly in the U.K. each year because their condition was diagnosed too late, according to research by the government’s director of cancer services. Also in 2009, there were reports that the health secretary ordered a probe into “claims that patients are dying due to poor care in at least 27 hospitals around the country.”

“The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with  poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that  cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in  the passion for survival.”   Adrienne Rich

 

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