The largest cohort of people treated in any medical system is the elderly.  In England, beginning in April, those elderly had better watch their mouths, or they're going to find themselves denied the health care they paid for with their taxes.

The problem with socialized medicine is that when it runs out of money (as it invariably does), the system has no alternative but to start rationing.  Britain, which is saddled with the National Health Service, long ago began contemplating death panels.  For example, Baroness Warnock, a well known British medical ethicist (hah!), suggested denying all care to elderly people with dementia.

In Liverpool, the NHS began stealth death panels that massively over-identified elderly people as being near death, justifying palliative care, and then drugged and dehydrated them to make those fake diagnoses a reality.  By 2012, a doctor estimated that the NHS was killing around 130,000 elderly patients a year because of management difficulties or bed shortages.  Things went downhill from there.

The NHS has now decided on a different way to rid itself of the elderly — a method, moreover, that meets all political correctness metrics:

Sexist and racist patients could be barred from non-emergency care at NHS trusts, under new rules to be enforced from April.

Currently, staff can refuse to treat non-critical patients who are verbally aggressive or physically violent towards them.

But these protections will extend to any harassment, bullying or discrimination, including homophobic, sexist or racist remarks.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock wrote to all NHS staff on Tuesday to announce stronger measures to investigate abuse and harassment towards staff, saying "no act of violence or abuse is minor".

[snip]

"All assault and hate crimes against NHS staff must be investigated with care, compassion, diligence and commitment," he said.

England does not have a First Amendment.  Hate crimes can include being mean on social media about someone's sexual orientation or gender identification, race, or sex.  In 2017, a preacher was locked up for quoting the Bible's words about homosexuality.  Just last week, a teenager with Asperger's asked a "transgender" police officer, "is it a boy or is it a girl?"  Because that question made this representative of the law "upset and embarrassed," the boy was placed under house arrest. 

Elderly people make up most of the patients in any health care system.  They are also the people least likely to be "woke."  Without malice, they may use old-fashioned phrases that are now considered offensive when referring to women, homosexuality, or race.  They probably don't even have a vocabulary for "non-binary" people.

In addition, elderly people often lack filters.  One of the signs of dementia is a lessening of inhibition, both verbal and physical.  An elderly person's early-stage dementia may not be obvious, except that the person might start saying things he would never have said if fully mentally competent.

And now, thanks to the new policy at the National Health Service, any employee whose feelings are hurt can ban a patient, elderly or not, from receiving taxpayer-funded health care.  Think about this care situation and a confused older patient:

"In late 2017 an NHS patient who requested a female nurse to carry out a cervical smear complained when the hospital sent a person with "an obviously male appearance ... close-cropped hair, a male facial appearance and voice, large number of tattoos and facial stubble" who insisted "My gender is not male. I'm a transsexual."

In addition to squeezing out elderly people, the whole system represents a further attack on free speech in Great Britain:

The line between critical and non-critcal [sic] care is also up for debate. Will refusal to treat a patient because they said something someone deems offensive result in accidental deaths?

This is even worse than China's social credit score, which hasn't yet gone so far as to punish people by withdrawing medical treatment if they engage in wrongthink.

Two more things to mull: First, Britain was the cradle of the rights we Americans take for granted.  The Founders took those rights so seriously that they fought a revolution to retain them, and then enshrined them in our Bill of Rights.  Second, if it can happen there, it can happen here.  The left never tires of the fight.  If we give these people an inch, they will always take a mile, or preferably a thousand miles.