Socialized medicine in UK uses 'death pathway' for inconvenient elderly
A UK doctor estimates that 130,000 elderly are put on a "death pathway" under socialized medical care to spare the medical system inconvenience. According to the UK Daily Mail:
"NHS (National Health Service) 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. Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial 'death pathway' into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly."
Which suggests the National Health Service should be called the National Death Service over there.
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.
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'.
One third of deaths in the UK now occur on the "Liverpool Death Pathway," the NHS euphemism of sticking a label on your toe indicating "Ready for death." The average time to die after that designation is 33 hours.
In other words, it's all a lie for euthanasia.
Historically, Britain was the model for the United States. The American Revolution was perceived by many Americans and Brits as a fight for the normal rights of British citizens on the American continent. We have a common political culture in many ways --- but not this, please. We don't need an ObamaCare "path to death" for sick and elderly people. We stand for hope, not despair, and for the value of each individual life, not for some cookie cutter approach to moving people out of the hospital wards and on to the funeral hearse.
As a British professor of medicine wrote last year, predicting death is not a science. It's a medical guess. Doctors are often surprised by patients who recover, and in some cases, doctors have diagnosed patients as being in an irreversible coma when they were only paralyzed and unable to communicate. Some stroke victims look like they are in coma, but they are only "locked in."
Treating people like used cars headed for the dump is the worst kind of disrespect for human life. British socialists will tell you that they HATE the death penalty, as administered in Texas for aggravated murder, for example. But their elderly get no trial by jury. They get no public defender. They get no elaborate court case to protect their rights.
They get a death panel.
Good and innocent people are discarded in Europe today. Guilty criminals receive all the protections of the law.
So who is immoral and inhumane, the celebrated Eurosocialists or those backward Americans?
Right.