The Left loves the idea of Medicare for all. If you think ObamaCare is bad – wait until they get their wish.
We an only look to Canada or the UK to see what socialized health care means to the masses.
An article in the U.K. Daily Telegraph reported that 1,000 home health care elderly and vulnerable patients died of thirst or while suffering from severe dehydration over the past decade in England and Wales. Why? Not because there was a shortage of water but because socialized healthcare gets to pick and choose who lives and who dies.
Figures obtained by the newspaper under freedom of information laws found that 1,158 care home residents suffered dehydration-related deaths just between 2003 and 2012. Dehydration was named as either the underlying cause of death or a contributory factor. Of course, the real figures are probably higher because the FOIA requests did not include those that were starved or dehydrated while in the hospital.
The U.K. care system has been hit with a succession of scandals in recent years, with homes accused of systematic neglect and carers jailed for abusing patients. Unannounced inspections by the Care Quality Commission, the supposed health watchdog, discovered that vulnerable people in homes and hospitals were routinely forced to use lavatories without doors, inadequately fed or just ignored and staff were heard dismissing the elderly as “lost causes.”
In 2011 a BBC Panorama investigation secretly filmed staff at Winterbourne View private hospital, near Bristol, hitting and taunting patients with learning disabilities. In October of that year a coroner said that Orchid View care home, near Crawley, West Sussex, where 19 residents died, was riddled with “institutionalised abuse” and criticised the CQC for rating the hospital as good in 2010. The sad truth is, it probably was “just as good” as it was in 2010.
As cost have continued to rise, The National Institute on Clinical Excellence (NICE), NHS’s death panel rationing and quality oversight board, adopted a protocol loving known as the “Liverpool Care Pathway” for doctors to use medical “palliative intervention or sedation.” In other words – cut cost by killing off
As is normal in government controlled medicine operated by an unelected panel of death experts, the “Pathway” has been used as “terminal sedation,” a backdoor euthanasia program. Where once dehydration was only allowed on those patients who were unconscious, the agenda was broadened. Now terminal sedation is used to intentionally kill by putting the person into a permanent artificial coma and withholding food and fluids – death by dehydration over a period of about two weeks.
A Cambridge University study suggested that some patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious state might in fact be able to direct attention to the sounds of the world around them. If this is true, can you image the horror of hearing doctors and family discussing the removal of food and water that is keeping you alive? Even worse, image the pain of the actual event! Death by dehydration is not a compassionate death.
The Euthanasia lobby, who first promoted death by dehydration, are now using death by dehydration as a reason for legalizing euthanasia. But the expansion and legalization of euthanasia isn’t about using medical means to end suffering. Rather, activists ultimately believe that there is a fundamental right to suicide to include any method a self-destructive person desires to exercise the choice to end all choices.
A right is a moral claim. The “right to life” is based on the fact that life is a gift, an inviolable right. This ridiculous “Right to die” is based on the idea of life as a “thing we possess” and may discard when it no longer meets our satisfaction. The “Right to die” philosophy says there is such a thing as a “life not worth living.” While we have a duty to alleviate suffering, it is impossible to live without suffering and therefore makes no sense to talk about a Right to be completely free of suffering.
As is evident in the UK and Canada, socialized medicine pushes demand beyond supply and government deals by limiting access, by killing off the weakest, the most vunerable, the costliest to treat through the use of dehydration, starvation or abortion. Socialized medicine is not about providing access to health care – its about control.
Socialism is the political system of the mediocre. Which goes a long way to explain why the UK death panel limits life-extending cancer drugs but pays out millions each year for non-medical alternative therapies such as magnetic field therapy and tai chi for MS, and aromatherapy for dementia.
