Let’s have universal healthcare like the UK, what do you say? The Daily Telegraph has released a letter saying that terminally ill patients are forced to die prematurely by the NHS. According to the report, the NHS has instituted guidelines to help medical staff with “end of life care”. Sound familiar?
NHS guidelines good for everybody
Within the guidelines setup by the NHS, UK doctors are often left to put terminally ill patients on continuous sedation until they pass away. They are also required to discontinue fluids and medication. So how does a medical staff determine which terminally ill patients are on their way out? From the Daily Telegraph:
“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.
“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients.”
Under NHS guidelines, that decision is left up to the entire medical staff including one senior doctor. They essentially “pull the plug” on grandma, perhaps before the plug should be pulled. They look for signs that a patient is dying such as loss of consciousness or inability to swallow medications. But experts are warning that these could be symptoms of being on “pain killers” like morphine or maybe even like the ones Barack Obama wants you to take.
This death panel as Sarah Palin so effectively put it is called the Liverpool Care Pathway or death pathway. Patients are sometimes wrongly put on the death pathway, simply because they are heavily sedated and it is impossible to see improvement in their condition.
So what’s in store for us? I think Sarah Palin had it right when she spoke of death panels, the only reasoning for terminally ill patients being forced to die is cost cutting. That’s exactly what Mrs. Palin was talking about when she made her controversial statement.
Remember, Obama himself said that in some situations a pain pill might be better as opposed to an expensive procedure. That type of thinking is what has led to terminally ill patients in the UK being forced to die prematurely by the NHS
Obama painkiller video