Death Panels in the UK
From the Daily Mail in London:
Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’.
Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults.
But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.
One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.
Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’.
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 fact is, when a bureaucracy pays for health care, its main focus over time becomes the money, not the lives. This, frankly, must happen when we hand over our freedoms to the government. Human nature fairly dictates that, again over time, our better natures lose to the almighty dollar/pound/euro. When we, individually, determine how and where our money’s spent, we can make better choices than society in the aggregate.
Individuals have a conscience. Government entities don’t.
Filed under: Culture • Government • Medicine
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“The fact is, when a bureaucracy pays for health care, its main focus over time becomes the money, not the lives.”
As opposed to when private health insurance companies pay for health care, its main focus is money and profit from the very start…?
The more of the payment process we have given over to insurance companies, yes, we have also made that mistake.
The difference is that I can chance my insurance company far, far easier than I can change my government.