More loving medical care under universal health care

Via Gateway Pundit

A leading medical journal in Great Britain revealed the gruesome practice of starving and withdrawing fluid from sickly babies as well as terminally-ill adults.

The Daily Mail reported:

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 use of end of life care methods on disabled newborn babies was revealed in the doctors’ bible, the British Medical Journal.

Earlier this month, an un-named doctor wrote of the agony of watching the protracted deaths of babies. The doctor described one case of a baby born with ‘a lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies’, whose parents agreed to put it on the pathway.

The doctor wrote: ‘They wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped. They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby.

‘Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. 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.

This is the ultimate price for rejecting Individualism and embracing Collectivism

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

Yes, Virginia, ObamaCare will lead to rationing

The Left can bury their heads in the sand as deep as they want to. The fact is this, ObamaCare will eventually lead to, well………..

When pro-life advocates list their reasons for opposing abortion-on-demand, they often cite their conviction that it is merely the first step toward even more grisly social engineering projects, including euthanasia for the old and infirm. This invariably produces sneers from soi-disant progressives, who smugly characterize these fears as hysterical nonsense. But such concerns will seem eminently reasonable to any open-minded reader who peruses the writings of Henry J. Aaron, the President’s nominee for Chair of the Social Security Advisory Board. Like Obama’s recess-appointed Medicare czar, Aaron is an unapologetic admirer of Great Britain’s notorious socialized medical system, the National Health Service (NHS). Why? Because NHS administrators unabashedly practice the dark art of health care rationing.

Aaron, a Senior Fellow in Economics at the Brookings Institution, is unable to imagine any route to cost control that doesn’t involve government coercion. In a 2005 Brookings white paper titled “Health Care Rationing: What it Means,” he represents the NHS as a system that has come to grips with what he sees as the inescapable necessity for rationing. Predictably, he rejects any alternative involving the market: “The key to efficient market outcomes is that prices reflect costs of production. The market for health care does not operate that way.” In other words, Aaron believes health care is a unique universe in which the market mysteriously fails to function and therefore can’t be relied upon to contain costs. It never seems to have occurred to him that the market’s alleged failure might be the result of government meddling.

Go read it all, it gets worse.

Who REALLY pays for nationalized health care?

As Michelle points out it is the sick people who often pay the big price

Meet some of the victims of nationalized health care ignored by Obamacare fantasizers stateside:

– Neglected elderly patients.

Health service executives and residential home managers are failing to ensure that elderly patients are seen by GPs, receive the therapy, out-of-hours care and specialist dementia treatments that they need, it said.

Doctors often simply tell staff that residents should go to straight to hospital, while some state-funded medics are reluctant to help privately-run care homes for ideological reasons, the report suggested.

The British Geriatrics Society, which conducted the inquiry, condemned the “betrayal” of elderly residents by an NHS that is “ageist” and treats patients in care homes as a “low priority”.

The report called on ministers to set clear national rules for doctors and hospitals on the services they must provide to care home residents.

The findings follow a series of highly critical reports from health inspectors at the Care Quality Commission into the neglect of the elderly in NHS hospitals. The watchdog found problems at a quarter of hospitals inspected, with dehydrated elderly patients being prescribed water and others left without being fed.

In a 50-page report, the British Geriatrics Society detailed evidence taken from care homes, academics, the NHS, and social services. It found that the health service was failing to guarantee adequate care to an estimated 400,000 older people in British care homes.

– Women and their unborn babies with Downs Syndrome or disabilities.

Shocking new statistics have been produced in England after a pro-life organization won its bid to make some abortion numbers public that the government had failed to disclose concerning abortions on disabled babies.

The numbers reveal, thousands of babies victimized by abortion merely because they were mentally or physically disabled — including 500 abortions done on unborn children who have Down syndrome. In total, 2,290 abortions were done on disabled babies with 147 done after 24 weeks of pregnancy.

The London Daily Mail indicates the statistics for England and Wales came after the Department of Health followed a Freedom of Information Request from the Pro Life Alliance, which won a 5-year battle to make the figures public and the figures are the first in over 10 years. The ways in which disabled babies are targeted by abortion makes it clear why the government was reluctant to make them available.

Julia Millington, spokeswoman for the ProLife Alliance, told the newspaper, “This is a great victory for transparency and freedom of speech and we are delighted that full information about the justification for late abortions is now being made available in the same detail as it was in 2001.”

The abortion numbers showed 482 babies aborted who had Down syndrome, including 10 aborted after 24 weeks; 123 babies who died in abortions with the nervous disorder spina bifida; abortions were done on 181 babies who had a club foot or other musculoskeletal problems, including 8 killed after 24 weeks of pregnancy. Seven babies who had cleft palates were victims of abortion.

Much much more at the link, please go read the entire piece. The evidence is clear, it is the sick, elderly, unwanted, or imperfect people who pay. Dear God, how can the Left defend this barbarity?