Government-run health care: starving sick babies and children to death

Here’s a scary story from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Dan Mitchell)

Excerpt:

Now sick babies go on death pathway: Doctor’s haunting testimony reveals how children are put on end-of-life plan

• Practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube being used on young patients
• Doctor admits starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in neonatal unit
• Liverpool Care Pathway subject of independent inquiry ordered by ministers
• Investigation, including child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions

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 investigation, which will include child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions.

Read the whole thing, but here’s a snip:

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‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.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 agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.’

This is what Democrats believe about health care. When the government runs health care, health stops being about curing sickness and starts being about buying votes. Suddenly, free abortions, breast enlargements, in vitro fertilization, drugs to calm down fatherless children, contraception, HIV/AIDS all become priorities. There are some people out there who want government to pay for the health effects of their own immoral / reckless choices, and that’s what government-run health care is really about. Enabling certain lifestyles that require health care subsidies so those people can live “as good as” traditional morality lifestyles. It’s interesting to note that in countries that have government-run health care, like Canada, doctors and nurses are regularly forced to act against their consciences to murder rather than cure. It’s no surprise because socialists in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany have essentially the same view of conscience as modern leftists like the Democrat Party.

There isn’t enough money for us to pay people to voluntarily incur health care costs (and other social costs) with their immoral / irresponsible choices. But that’s exactly what happens when you make everything “health care” and then make it “free” in order to buy votes from people like Sandra Fluke. What Democrats do is look for groups that need subsidies or validation and they offer it to them with taxpayer money and laws prohibiting dissent. They essentially take the complete anti-freedom point of view on every question. They hate liberty, and love power. The want to control others and to be adored by those who depend on their benevolent redistribution of other people’s money.

Related posts

• Public health care working as designed in the UK and Canada
• NHS paying millions to hospitals to deny food and fluids to end-of-life patients
• UK socialism in action: patients waiting on trolleys for over 50 hours
• NHS makes patients wait unnecessarily in order to avoid “raising expectations”
• NHS refuses to treat woman who is starving to death
• Former NHS hospital director dies on surgery waiting list
• Women gives birth after NHS nurses send her home from hospital
• UK patients denied treatment as “public option” system makes cutbacks
• How do governments control costs in a single-payer health care systems?
• NHS patients giving birth in waiting rooms
• What does universal health care really mean?
• How well is government-run health care working out in the UK?
• British national health care system prepares to cut 20 billion dollars
• NHS kills a man’s wife by delaying cancer treatment for 7 months
• How is socialized medicine working out in the UK and Canada?
• Police probe death of NHS hospital patient who begged for water
• How government-run health care leads to euthanasia
• NHS employees leapfrog their own waiting lists to access private health care
• NHS delays treatment for broken arm for four months and counting
• One in six patients misdiagnosed by NHS
• The deadly consequences of rationing health care
• Health care in Britain: question a doctor and lose your children
• How death panels work in the British health care system
• One million NHS patients receive brutally inadequate health care
• 4000 NHS patients denied hospital beds to give birth to children
• Woman gives birth on pavement after NHS refuses to send an ambulance
• NHS hospitals infested with a dozen varieties of vermin
• 39-year old woman is prescribed painkillers and dies after 11-minute NHS exam
• NHS refuses to pay for lower-back painkillers

Filed under: News, Canada, Choice, Competition, Costs, Death, Death Panels, Denied, Doctor, End of Life, Euthanasia, Government, Health-care, Horror Story, Hospital, LCP, Liverpool Care Pathway, Medicine, Mercy Killing, Murder, National Health Service, NHS, NHS Horror Story, Obamacare, Operation, Patient, Public Option, Single-Payer, Socialism, Socialized Medicine, Terminal, Treatment, UK, Waiting List

Public health care working as designed in the UK and Canada

The UK Daily Mail gives us a bird’s eye view of the largest government-run health care delivery system in the world.

Excerpt:

A mother has described how her baby was left to die ‘like an abandoned animal’ after hospital doctors repeatedly ignored her desperate pleas for help.

Paula Stevenson begged doctors to act as her one-year-old daughter Hayley struggled to breathe in the days after a major heart operation.

She was so desperate she even tried ‘bribing’ a nurse with a £100 shopping voucher to give Hayley the attention she needed. Instead, hospital staff ‘humiliated and belittled’ her – treating her like a ‘nuisance’ for speaking up, she said.

Tragically, Mrs Stevenson’s maternal instinct was proven right when Hayley died of heart failure after both her lungs collapsed under the hospital’s watch.

Yesterday, as an inquest into her death concluded, a coroner said there had been ‘serious failings’ in Hayley’s care. Birmingham Children’s Hospital admitted full liability for her ‘avoidable’ death.

[...]Doctors failed to update her medical charts, were slow to look at X-rays and failed to refer Hayley to intensive care when her condition worsened.

People only care about giving you good service if they have to compete for your business in a free market, where suppliers have to offer higher quality at a lower price. Maybe that’s why the American for-profit system delivers so much better care than anywhere else in the world, and why the socialized medicine system in the UK is a miserable failure at everything except killing patients dead. The customer is never right in a government-run system. You are forced to pay into it first, and then they decide later what treatment you can have – after they’ve already been paid.

Well, maybe that’s just a problem in the UK. Canada has a single-payer government run health care system. Maybe it works better than the UK government-run system? The Montreal Gazette reports on health care in Quebec – la belle province – Canada’s most secularized and socialist province.

Excerpt:

Surgery wait times for deadly ovarian, cervical and breast cancers in Quebec are three times longer than government benchmarks, leading some desperate patients to shop around for an operating room.

But that’s a waste of time, doctors say, since the problem is spread across Quebec hospitals. And doctors are refusing to accept new patients quickly because they can’t treat them, health advocates say.

[...]The latest figures from the provincial government show that over a span of nearly 11 months, 7,780 patients in the Montreal area waited six months or longer for day surgeries, while another 2,957 waited for six months or longer for operations that required hospitalization.

The worst cases are gynecological cancers, experts say, because usually such a cancer has already spread by the time it is detected. Instead of four weeks from diagnosis to surgery, patients are waiting as long as three months to have cancerous growths removed.

But maybe the government-run health care systems cost less than the private systems? After all, governments can be more efficient than the private sector, because they have a monopoly and that’s more efficient, right? The Vancouver Sun reports on what single-payer health care costs in Canada.

Excerpt:

The true cost of Canada’s health care system is more than $11,000 in taxes each year for an average family, according to Vancouver-based think tank The Fraser Institute.

[...]Institute senior fellow Nadeem Esmail said in a news release sent out this morning: “There’s a widespread belief that health care is free in Canada. It’s not; our tax dollars cover the cost of it. But the way we pay for health care disguises exactly how much public health care insurance costs Canadian families and how that cost is increasing over time.”

The release noted that since 2002, the cost of health care insurance for the average Canadian family increased by 59.8 per cent before inflation.

“By way of comparison, the cost of public health care increased more than twice as fast as the cost of shelter, roughly four times as fast as the cost of food, and more than five times as fast as the cost of clothing,” the release said.

This is the system that Obamacare is trying to force onto us by eliminating private sector health care. We voted for a system that takes the consumer out of the health care business. Now government will call the shots, just like in the UK and in Canada.

Related posts

• NHS paying millions to hospitals to deny food and fluids to end-of-life patients
• UK socialism in action: patients waiting on trolleys for over 50 hours
• NHS makes patients wait unnecessarily in order to avoid “raising expectations”
• NHS refuses to treat woman who is starving to death
• Former NHS hospital director dies on surgery waiting list
• Women gives birth after NHS nurses send her home from hospital
• UK patients denied treatment as “public option” system makes cutbacks
• How do governments control costs in a single-payer health care systems?
• NHS patients giving birth in waiting rooms
• What does universal health care really mean?
• How well is government-run health care working out in the UK?
• British national health care system prepares to cut 20 billion dollars
• NHS kills a man’s wife by delaying cancer treatment for 7 months
• How is socialized medicine working out in the UK and Canada?
• Police probe death of NHS hospital patient who begged for water
• How government-run health care leads to euthanasia
• NHS employees leapfrog their own waiting lists to access private health care
• NHS delays treatment for broken arm for four months and counting
• One in six patients misdiagnosed by NHS
• The deadly consequences of rationing health care
• Health care in Britain: question a doctor and lose your children
• How death panels work in the British health care system
• One million NHS patients receive brutally inadequate health care
• 4000 NHS patients denied hospital beds to give birth to children
• Woman gives birth on pavement after NHS refuses to send an ambulance
• NHS hospitals infested with a dozen varieties of vermin
• 39-year old woman is prescribed painkillers and dies after 11-minute NHS exam
• NHS refuses to pay for lower-back painkillers

Filed under: News, Canada, Choice, Competition, Costs, Death, Death Panels, Denied, Doctor, End of Life, Euthanasia, Government, Health-care, Horror Story, Hospital, LCP, Liverpool Care Pathway, Medicine, Mercy Killing, Murder, National Health Service, NHS, NHS Horror Story, Obamacare, Operation, Patient, Public Option, Single-Payer, Socialism, Socialized Medicine, Terminal, Treatment, UK, Waiting List

NHS paying millions to hospitals to deny food and fluids to end-of-life patients

From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Almost two thirds of NHS trusts using the Liverpool Care Pathway have received payouts totalling millions of pounds for hitting targets related to its use, research forThe Daily Telegraph shows.

The figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal the full scale of financial inducements for the first time.

They suggest that about 85 per cent of trusts have now adopted the regime, which can involve the removal of hydration and nutrition from dying patients.

More than six out of 10 of those trusts – just over half of the total – have received or are due to receive financial rewards for doing so amounting to at least £12million.

[...]At many hospitals more than 50 per cent of all patients who died had been placed on the pathway and in one case the proportion of forseeable deaths on the pathway was almost nine out of 10.

[...]The LCP was originally developed at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and the city’s Marie Curie hospice to ease suffering in dying patients, setting out principles for how they to be treated.

It involves the withdrawal of treatments or tests from patients which doctors believe could cause distress and do more harm than good.

[...]A series of cases have also come to light in which family members said they were not consulted or even informed when food and fluids were withheld from their loved-ones.

What would happen if we had government-run health care? When you make something “free”, more people want to use it, but fewer people want to provide it – because there is no money in it. So what does the government do to control costs? They ration care to people who can no longer vote to keep them in power. The weak, the elderly – just put them on a pathway to death. Is that what we want here in the United States?

Related posts

• UK socialism in action: patients waiting on trolleys for over 50 hours
• NHS makes patients wait unnecessarily in order to avoid “raising expectations”
• NHS refuses to treat woman who is starving to death
• Former NHS hospital director dies on surgery waiting list
• Women gives birth after NHS nurses send her home from hospital
• UK patients denied treatment as “public option” system makes cutbacks
• How do governments control costs in a single-payer health care systems?
• NHS patients giving birth in waiting rooms
• What does universal health care really mean?
• How well is government-run health care working out in the UK?
• British national health care system prepares to cut 20 billion dollars
• NHS kills a man’s wife by delaying cancer treatment for 7 months
• How is socialized medicine working out in the UK and Canada?
• Police probe death of NHS hospital patient who begged for water
• How government-run health care leads to euthanasia
• NHS employees leapfrog their own waiting lists to access private health care
• NHS delays treatment for broken arm for four months and counting
• One in six patients misdiagnosed by NHS
• The deadly consequences of rationing health care
• Health care in Britain: question a doctor and lose your children
• How death panels work in the British health care system
• One million NHS patients receive brutally inadequate health care
• 4000 NHS patients denied hospital beds to give birth to children
• Woman gives birth on pavement after NHS refuses to send an ambulance
• NHS hospitals infested with a dozen varieties of vermin
• 39-year old woman is prescribed painkillers and dies after 11-minute NHS exam
• NHS refuses to pay for lower-back painkillers

Filed under: News, Choice, Competition, Costs, Death, Death Panels, Denied, Doctor, End of Life, Euthanasia, Government, Health-care, Horror Story, Hospital, LCP, Liverpool Care Pathway, Medicine, Mercy Killing, Murder, National Health Service, NHS, NHS Horror Story, Obamacare, Operation, Patient, Public Option, Single-Payer, Socialism, Terminal, Treatment, UK, Waiting List

Margaret Somerville explains the real issue in the euthanasia debate

Margaret Somerville

From the Ottawa Citizen.

Excerpt:

Recently, I saw an illustration that accompanied an article about euthanasia. It showed the silhouette of a patient lying on a bed. There was an electrical outlet on the wall behind the bed and an unplugged connecting cord hanging down over the side of the bed.

Except in very rare circumstances — for instance, if the treatment were withdrawn without the necessary consent or against the patient’s wishes — withdrawal of life-support treatment is not euthanasia. Yet many people, including the artist who penned this illustration and many health-care professionals, mistakenly believe that it is.

In my experience, they are confused with respect to the ethical and legal differences between withdrawal of treatment that results in death and euthanasia, and why the former can be ethically and legally acceptable, provided certain conditions are fulfilled, and the latter cannot be. This is a central and important distinction in the euthanasia debate, which needs to be understood.

She’s the famous professor of  medicine, ethics and law at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. She’s like Canada’s version of Jennifer Roback Morse.

Filed under: Commentary, Canada, Death, Doctor, End of Life, Ethics, Euthanasia, Health-care, Law, Life, Life Issues, Margaret Somerville, McGill University, Montreal, Morality, Patient, Quebec, Terminal, Unplug

How reliable are persistent vegetative state diagnoses?

Check out this article from The Weekly Standard. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The case of Terri Schiavo–who died five years ago next March, deprived for nearly two weeks of food and water, even the balm of ice chips–continues to prick consciences. That may be one reason the case of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a persistent vegetative state, is now receiving international attention.

In 1983, Houben suffered catastrophic head injuries in an automobile accident. He arrived at the hospital unconscious. Doctors eventually concluded that his case was hopeless, and his family was told he would never waken. But the Houben family, like Terri’s parents and siblings, didn’t give up. They diligently sought out every medical advance. This wasn’t delusion or pure wishful thinking. Several studies have shown that about 40 percent of persistent vegetative state diagnoses are wrong.

[...]During the years that Houben was thought unconscious, society changed. Bioethicists nudged medicine away from the Hippocratic model and toward “quality of life” judgmentalism. Today, when a patient is diagnosed as persistently unconscious or minimally aware, doctors, social workers, and bioethicists often recommend that life-sustaining treatment–including sustenance delivered through a tube–be withdrawn, sometimes days or weeks after the injury.

One thing that stands out to me about this story is how the medical profession has accepted the idea that it is OK to kill people who do not have a high enough quality of life. What is behind this view? Well, I think it’s caused by secularism. Secularism has marginalized the Christian worldview that dominated the West. One component of that Christian worldview is that it is morally good to deny yourself happiness to care for the needs of others. And that the right thing is not based on your opinion or the arbitrary views of the majority of people in your culture.

On the secular worldview, though, there is no “right thing” that we “ought to do”. The universe is an accident and there is no design. The only thing to do on an atheistic worldview is to be “happy”. And you can’t be happy if other people need you to take care of them. So, I think that this is what is behind the push by secularists to kill the weak and stop them from using up resources. Secularists look at people who need them, and they want to kill them. There is no objective duty of self-sacrifice for others, on atheism.

Christopher Hitchens is fond of asking people he debates to name one thing that a Christian can do that an atheist can’t do. Here’s one: an atheist can’t rationally ground the decision to sacrifice their own pursuit of happiness to take care of the needs of others. On atheism, self-sacrifice is irrational, unless it makes you happy. You only have one life. There is no way you ought to be. The purpose of life is to be happy. The needs of the weak diminish your happiness. It’s survival of the fittest. That’s what is rational on atheism.

UPDATE: I just got back from breakfast at Denny’s and I was reading Jennifer Roback Morse’s “Love and Economics”. She was talking a lot about the helplessness of babies, and what mothers and fathers do that make children grow up capably. She writes that early on in the baby’s life they scream for everything and the mother has to be there to meet those needs or the child will never learn to trust. Later on, the parents try to encourage the child to be better-behaved and self-sufficient.

All this made me recall this post. If a selfish person believes that it is too much work to care of someone sick who needs extra love, then that person isn’t going to be willing to take care of babies, either. And I guess that’s exactly where we are as a society now, with people having fewer babies, but more abortions and day care. And of course people divorce when they have small children as well, which (usually) deprives the child of a father.

Filed under: Commentary, Bioethics, Coma, Compassion, Conscious, Consciousness, Culture of Death, Dependent, End of Life, Ethics, Euthanasia, Life, Love, Medical Ethics, Morality, Persistent Vegetative State, Pro-Life, PVS, Quality of Life, Right to Life, Rom Houben, Secularism, Terri Schiavo, Vegetative State