Lance Burri: But it’s okay: it’s universal health care

Great headline, from the master of great headlines, but an even more important point!

Now here’s the story:

NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.

Huh. I wonder how they decide which “elderly hospital patients” get that “treatment?” There isn’t a panel involved, is there?

Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.

He claimed there was often a lack of clear evidence for initiating the Liverpool Care Pathway…

It’s got a name.

… a method of looking after terminally ill patients that is used in hospitals across the country.

It is designed to come into force when doctors believe it is impossible for a patient to recover and death is imminent.

But, as this whistleblower told the media, that simply isn’t always the case.

There are around 450,000 deaths in Britain each year of people who are in hospital or under NHS care. Around 29 per cent – 130,000 – are of patients who were on the LCP.

Almost one out of three deaths occur because the hospital means it to.

And notice this: the whistleblower who’s making these accusations isn’t upset that it’s happening. He’s upset that it’s happening too much:

Professor Pullicino claimed that far too often elderly patients who could live longer are placed on the LCP and it had now become an ‘assisted death pathway rather than a care pathway’.

If that does not chill you to the core, you are lacking a soul, or have a show on MSNBS