Rationing and ‘Death Panels’ Widely Used in Britain

The president and his allies keep telling us that talk of rationing and death panels under ObamaCare is silly. Indeed, they call these criticisms bogus, laughable, cynical, irresponsible, and a “lie, plain and simple.” Here is Obama, saying all those things in the first minute.

In the British National Health Service, which has been in place for 60 years, not only are rationing and ‘death panels’ happening, they are policy. ‘Death panel’ is a euphemism for government bureaucrats deciding that somebody is too old or too sick to continue to receive costly treatment, the treatment is discontinued, and the patient is left to die.

From CNS News.

The second recent blow to the NHS’s reputation involved claims by experts that guidelines for care of the dying, which are being rolled out across the country, may be ending the lives of some patients prematurely because they are assessed as being closer to death than they actually are.

In a letter published in The Daily Telegraph, six experts raised concerns about the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient (LCP), described by health authorities as a “template to guide the delivery of care for the dying.”

Implemented in 2004 and now used in hundreds of hospitals and care homes, the LCP advises senior staff to assess whether a patient is near death, based on signs such as difficulty swallowing or moving in and out of consciousness.

If deemed to be close to death, patients are put on “the pathway” and doctors can withdraw food and fluids and halt any intervention judged to be of no further benefit. They may also be sedated until they die.

The LCP recommends that the situation should be discussed with relatives.

Hmmm. Having the government put an elderly patient on a ‘pathway’ (the rest of that phrase would be ‘to death’), by withdrawing food and fluids and sedating them until they die, sure sounds a lot like government bureaucrats deciding to ‘kill off grandma.”

And note that while the government ‘recommends’ that the situation be discussed with relatives. There is apparently no requirement that the families be notified or consulted at all about the government’s decision to withhold medical care of a loved one. And there is definitely nothing here that suggests the family has any ability to make the decision about continuing medical care or to oppose the government’s decision.

You can argue about the term Death Panel all day long, but the bottom line is that the government, not the families, is deciding who lives and who dies.

Rationing

When big brother Socialist programs are implemented, the first thing they do is change the names of the bad parts to benign, politically palatable terms. Thus ‘rationing’ becomes ‘choices.’ But the bottom line is that the government decides whether you will get your medication.

So early Alzheimer’s patients were denied medication, because they were not sick enough. It was just too expensive.

Ensuring cost-efficiency in the NHS is the function of NICE. The agency came under fire in 2006 for guidance saying that drugs for Alzheimer’s should only be prescribed on the NHS to patients with moderate-stages disease, and not those in the early stages.

NICE argued that the drugs, which cost a little over $4 a day, did not make enough of a difference for them to be recommended for all patients.

Opponents of the move took legal action, but the High Court in London upheld NICE’s position in a ruling that the Alzheimer’s Society described as “insulting and devastating news.”

Osteoporotic women were also denied treatment deemed too expensive by the government.

Last week an osteoporosis expert told a British Science Association festival that thousands of British women suffering from the brittle bone condition were being denied better, but more expensive treatment. NICE is not due to appraise the new treatment for another three years.

“So much for the promise at the inception of the NHS that all medicines and care would be given from ‘cradle to grave’,” said Dr. Helen Evans, director of Nurses for Reform, in response to the news.

Oh, and if you suffer from chronic back pain in Britain, you are out of luck too.

The Government’s drug rationing watchdog says “therapeutic” injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.

Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.

Specialists fear tens of thousands of people, mainly the elderly and frail, will be left to suffer excruciating levels of pain or pay as much as £500 each for private treatment.

The NHS currently issues more than 60,000 treatments of steroid injections every year. NICE said in its guidance it wants to cut this to just 3,000 treatments a year, a move which would save the NHS £33 million.

Okay, so they are cutting the allowable injections from 60,000 down to 3,000, which presumably means that 57,000 people will no longer get pain medication for their bad back. But what are they crying about, the government will “allow” them to get acupuncture. How nice of them.

Here is the Orwellian rationing in action. It boils down to whether the government thinks your life is valuable enough for them to spend the money on you.

On its Web site, NICE explains how it decides whether or not a treatment is cost-effective, through use of a measure called a quality-adjusted life year (QALY).

QALY aims to calculate how many extra months or years of life of a reasonable quality a patient may gain as a result of treatment. Quality of life is gauged taking into account factors like the level of pain, mobility and general mood [me - so grumpy people don't get treatment?].

NICE then calculates how much the drug or treatment costs per QALY gained. If the treatment costs 20,000-30,000 pounds sterling (approximately $33,000-$49,400) per QALY gained, the agency considers it cost-effective.

“If a treatment costs more than £30,000 per QALY gained, it is not normally recommended for use in the NHS.”

“With the rapid advances in modern medicine, most people accept that no publicly funded healthcare system, including the NHS, can possibly pay for every new medical treatment which becomes available,” NICE says.

“The enormous costs involved mean that choices have to be made.”

And there it is. When they decide you are not worth the price of the treatment, you don’t get it. They call it ‘choice,’ but it’s really a decision, and that decision is to ration medical care.