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‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.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

How euthanasia eroded medical ethics in the Netherlands

Joe Carter writing in First Things. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via ECM)

Intro:

For centuries, the Hippocratic Oath, including the admonition against abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia, formed the core of Western medical ethics. While the Hippocratic ideal has been eroding for decades, the most direct challenge has emerged in the Netherlands, with the cultural and legal acceptance of the right to die. The medical community and broader citizenry have so embraced the right to choose death for oneself that the Dutch parliament is currently considering legislation that would allow assisted suicide for anyone who has reached the age of seventy and has merely grown tired of living.

Excerpt:

The Royal Dutch Medical Association has since called for increased reporting to bolster public trust in euthanasia laws. But enthusiasm for following these procedures and standards remains muted, since doctors know that no penalties will be incurred by simply ignoring the law. Prosecutions for guideline violations are exceedingly rare and no doctor has ever been imprisoned or substantially penalized for noncompliance. Even when the government is made aware of cases of non-voluntary euthanasia, no legal action is likely to be taken.

The Dutch have even expanded the scope of protected physician killing to include children. With their parent’s permission, a child between the ages of 12 to 16 years old may request and receive assisted suicide. Initially, minors could obtain an assisted death even if their parents objected, but after domestic and international criticism, the law was changed to require parental consent.

[...]As reported in one Dutch documentary, a young woman in remission from anorexia was concerned that her eating disorder would return. To prevent a relapse, she asked her doctor to kill her. He willingly complied with her request.

[...]Over a period of forty years, the Dutch have continued the search for where to draw the line with euthanasia, shifting from acceptance of voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, to voluntary euthanasia for the chronically ill, to non-voluntary euthanasia for the sick and disabled, to euthanasia for those who are not sick at all but are merely “suffering through living.” While the initial impetus may have been spurred by a desire to give expanded rights to the person who faces extreme suffering or imminent death, the effect has been to concentrate power into the hands of state-sponsored medical professionals. And while the justification for assisted death is usually the supposed well being of the suffering patient, the Dutch have redefined natural dependency into an unacceptable or unwanted social burden.

This is another concern I have about single-payer health care. The way the system works is that people have taxes deducted automatically from their pay checks when they are working. And when they get older, and stop working, they have to ask for treatment from a supplier that has no incentive to provide treatment or care, since they are no longer socially useful because they can’t pay taxes. Instead of doctors thinking that they have to treat a paying customer, the doctors think that they have to avoid wasting “society’s” money on people who are too old to pay into the system.

So if you don’t pay into the system, and the system needs money to treat those who are still paying, then why would they treat you? You have no value to society unless you are making money.

There was a good article on socialized medicine and euthanasia by Richard Miniter in the Wall Street Journal a few years back that explains my concerns more.

To deal with his point about doctors changing to view their purpose as ending suffering instead of getting people well, I think that this is scary because it shows how far we have come with our hedonism. My concern is that people are viewing the purpose of life as hedonism.

People want to have happy feelings all the time, and they don’t want to be burdened with the needs of anyone else. There’s no longer any moral dimension to life that makes taking care of others worthwhile. No one sees the experience of self-sacrificial love for others as an opportunity to imitate Christ.

UPDATE:

More horror. Patients in the Netherlands are suing to require that sexual gratification be part of the “medical services” that nurses should perform. I can’t even begin to express my revulsion at this story about health care in the Netherlands. Women were not made to be treated like this, they’re made to love and to be loved. I’m so scared of the future. It’s things like this that put me off of wanting to pursue marriage and children. What kind of world will my children grow up in? What will the government force them to do that will destroy their willingness and ability to follow Jesus? I can’t re-make the whole world.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Assisted Suicide, Care, Children, Christ, Death, Disabled, Doctor, Dutch, Elderly, Euthanasia, Following Christ, Handicapped, Hedonism, Hippocratic Oath, Infanticide, Involuntary, Law, Love, Medical Ethics, Mercy Killing, Morality, Netherlands, Patient, Physician, Right to Die, Self-sacrifice, Socialized Medicine

How is government-run health care working out in Canada?

Political Map of Canada

This Vancouver Sun story was linked at Unambigously Ambidextrous and the Heritage Foundation. (H/T DJ)

Excerpt:

Dr. Brian Brodie, president of the BC Medical Association, called the proposed surgical cuts “a nightmare.”

“Why would you begin your cost-cutting measures on medically necessary surgery? I just can’t think of a worse place,” Brodie said.

According to the leaked document, Vancouver Coastal — which oversees the budget for Vancouver General and St. Paul’s hospitals, among other health-care facilities — is looking to close nearly a quarter of its operating rooms starting in September and to cut 6,250 surgeries, including 24 per cent of cases scheduled from September to March and 10 per cent of all medically necessary elective procedures this fiscal year.

Now consider this story about elderly patients and euthaaisia, from the Washington Examiner. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

“I recommend that you seriously consider a “do not resuscitate” order, said the seemingly nice man in the white coat. “He has diminishing quality of life. And, if he has an infection or illness, we can provide comfort care for him.”

[...]An emergency room doctor made similar comments. She suggested that I did not need to feed him now that he was unable to feed himself–in essence suggesting euthanasia for a man who simply had an infection treatable with antibiotics.

[...]Despite the persistent infection, Dad was discharged because his temperature fell one-tenth of one point below the Medicare guideline for hospitalization. I begged the doctor to let him stay, citing his Blue Cross Blue Shield coverage. The doctor insisted that Medicare ruled and that my father was safer outside of the hospital where he would be less likely to contract a secondary infection.

I did what most people do; I trusted the authoritative person in the white coat. It was a fatal mistake. The lingering infection led to complications that killed him a few weeks later.

Rationing of care to the elderly is already taking place in government-run programs like Medicare. I don’t think we should expand government control any further.

This is the problem with making health care “free”. Everybody wants to use it. So demand is HIGH. But the government doesn’t have unlimited money, so supply is LOW. That’s why there is a SHORTAGE. And that’s why waiting lists, rationing, euthanasia and service cuts are needed.

Filed under: News, Antibiotics, BC, British Columbia, Canada, Canadian, Dementia, Elderly, Euthanasia, Feed, Government, Government-Run, Infection, Liberals, Lori Roman, Medicaid, Medicare, Mercy Killing, Nationalized, NDP, Single-Payer, Socialized