Palin is right… in the U.K.

There was a lot of debate a few weeks ago regarding the concept of “death panels” that stem from single-payer health care. When former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin spotlighted it, the defenders of the Obama camp attacked her as a fear monger. Maybe so, but then again…

Here’s Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre, explaining the perils of the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) attempt to promote humane premature death of patients considered terminal, a program termed the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP). According to the U.K. Telegraph, “300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.”

He [Dr. Hargreaves] added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.

He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.

“It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway.”

He added: “What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying.

“It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking.”

He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.

Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.

In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.

“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.

What the good doctor above calls “laudable” — good intentions creating immorality or at least amorality — is a natural consequence of any health care system that seeks to replace the marketplace of choices with a single-payer system whose only cost control is the rationing of care.

This health care rationing does not just affect the terminally ill, but both the moderately to seriously ill and especially the elderly, who fall victim to bureaucrat’s distanced and cold spreadsheet-and-abacus methodology to determine who receives care.