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Posted on 09/19/2014 7:31:57 AM PDT by wagglebee
Let me tell you a little story.
Once upon a time, my beloved uncle and aunt, who live in northern England, were close friends with a nice couple whom I’ll call Margaret and James. These were perfectly ordinary middle class people, who are of the immediate post-War generation, born in the mid-40s. They worked quite hard all their lives, and built a business, which did fairly well. They had assumed that this work would pay off in the long term, and that because they had planned carefully and wisely, and had saved and lived pretty sensibly, that they were more or less set for retirement. This is, after all, how it is supposed to work.
They were about five years into this retirement, and having a pretty nice time, going on modest holidays, spending a lot of time with the grandchildren, being involved in local civic and cultural organisations… exactly what you would think such salt-of-the-earth types would be up to in the second half of life. Then one day, James had a stroke. He was rushed to hospital and received excellent treatment and care, but the damage was done. James was a long time in hospital, and when he was released to go home, he was unable to care for himself.
The therapists had mostly got him talking again, and he could eat on his own, but he required constant attendance, something his loving wife was, given her age and lack of formal nursing skills, realistically unable to give. James was able to get about the house for a while, but needed a wheel chair when he went out, and his condition deteriorated.
How do you think a government body whose job it is to make sure that medical treatment in Britain does not exceed its budget allocations, will respond to an opportunity to take these expensive people right out of the financial picture?
Finally, the inevitable had to be faced, and Margaret looked into the options. But this is Britain, so all the “options” were whatever the government was willing to provide. This meant that a home help for household tasks and a home visiting nurse were impossible – and of course, a live-in nurse was out of the question.
You see, James and Margaret had worked too hard and planned too well for their retirement. While they weren't so well off that they could afford to pay 100% of the costs of long-term care themselves, they had planned too well in the eyes of the government.
The Council told them, “You have too much money and too many assets. You can only get James in if you sell your home, liquidate all your assets and give us the money. Once you are jointly worth under 24,000 pounds, then we’ll have a place for you.”
(This sort of thing has become common. Read here.)
The Socialism that has taken over every public institution in Britain, and crowded and bullied the churches out of their caring role, had taken away all the choices but one. They must impoverish themselves, wiping out any possibility of a comfortable long-term survival for Margaret – and never mind leaving something for the grandchildren, before getting the care James needed. Everything they had worked for all their lives was sold off and given to the government in exchange for care.
It was not very long before James, a kindly and hard working, decent man, started using that peculiar British expression, “being a burden.” He died soon after of natural causes.
The names and details of the story have been changed, of course, but the story is absolutely true.
Falconer's bill
Every year, with the end of the summer holidays and the turning of the leaves come all the joys of the new Parliamentary session, and a return to all our legislative worries, including, perhaps most prominently in the UK this year, the possibility that the mother country will legalise assisted suicide. The Falconer bill is headed back to the committee examining it in the House of Lords, and it is expected to be passed by that formerly august body, and sent off to the Commons.
Recently, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Surgeons, and perhaps most poignantly, the Association for Palliative Medicine, submitted strong statements against the idea of legal “assisted suicide” (a term that is coming to have very little to distinguish it from outright euthanasia).
They mainly argue that patients suffering from terminal illness are emotionally vulnerable, they can be frightened and deeply agitated, and in a depressed mental and emotional state. They point out that the bill’s main flaw is the concept that a person in such a state could make a valid choice to want to die. They point out that this mental state, that would naturally produce a desire for suicide, is, ipso facto, a condition that would preclude their being able to make a calm and informed decision.
One would think that the statements of these people, doctors who deal directly with such patients, would hold a lot of weight. But if one were inclined to think that, one might also think that ultrasounds demonstrating that an unborn child is in fact a living human being, whom it is wrong to kill, would have put a stop to legalised abortion decades ago. What is at work here is not reality but a determined nihilist, anti-human ideology, a “culture of death,” as someone once called it.
If there are people out there who still think, in the face of forty-odd years of such medical evidence, as well as common sense, that such legislation is based on facts, science and reason, then I suppose no amount of evidence to the contrary will suffice to change their minds. As Professor Peter Kreeft once said in answer to my question about it, “There are some who can only be moved by prayer and fasting,” meaning that we are faced not with science, reason and facts, but the awful, ancient and terrifying mystery of human evil, which will never be fully fathomed by us in this life.
So, yes, this year we again have Falconer’s bill to fight. And, despite the sudden plunge of the proposal’s popularity among medical professionals, the notion of killing oneself with a doctor’s “help” still remains wildly popular among Britain’s public.
While Falconer’s supporters, the organisation formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, have claimed that support is at 80%, Care Not Killing counters that the numbers, once numerical clarity has been achieved, look more realistically like 43%.
But while 43% won’t tip the scales in a referendum (no, there isn’t going to be one) it’s still an extraordinary figure. Of a population of about 64 million people, nearly thirty million think allowing doctors to give people drugs to kill themselves or, more likely, to have their relatives do the deed, is a perfectly sane, sensible and reasonable idea.
How did the UK learn to love euthanasia?
It does make one wonder, how did a country formerly known for its stoicism and common sense come to such a cultural pass?
The reasons for the peculiar enthusiasm of British people for euthanasia are varied and complex, and probably have much to do with the terrible hardening of many British hearts that have, apparently, definitively turned away from God and his priority of mercy, love and self-forgetfulness. A thorough examination of the phenomenon would require a fearless dive into the nation’s philosophical and moral history since the English Reformation, and therefore be more or less impossible for a blog post.
But there is one thing that is clearly fuelling the nation’s euthanasia-mania that perhaps is easier to talk about, but that is going largely unnoticed: socialism. All medical care in Britain is provided by the government. All. And the government has this interesting body, called the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE – yes, that’s really it … not making it up…) whose task it is to decide who does and does not get treatment, and, perhaps even more ominously, what “level” of treatment a person is entitled to, all judged according to a precise mathematical formula.
The NICE are, effectively, the triage body, to decide whether your life, or the life of your mum or dad or grandma, is worth spending the money trying to save, given whatever’s wrong with you. For instance, if you are 30 and you have cancer, you might get access to certain drugs or treatments for which a 70-year-old with cancer will not be approved. The principle at work, in its essence, is back to good old British Utilitarianism; Jeremy Bentham’s ice-cold calculation of the “greatest good for the greatest number”. It is still not widely understood that this, the philosophy of the gas chamber, is back with a vengeance as the leading principle in nearly all the hospital and medical ethics boards and conferences in nearly every country of the western world.
Now, with this in mind, how do you think a government body whose job it is to make sure that medical treatment in Britain does not exceed its budget allocations, will respond to an opportunity to take these expensive people right out of the financial picture?
And How long do you think it would take a couple like James and Margaret, who, like most British people, had never been near a church for anything but weddings and funerals since the 1950s, to start to think that a painless injection would be the solution to all their problems?
It is IMPOSSIBLE to have socialized medicine and not have death panels.
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Coming here any time now. I really think it’s already being done to our veterans.
My heart goes out to all of us as we age
BUT why should the gov’t ( meaning the rest of us ) pay for his home care when they had money to pay for it?
Put an elderly family member in the nursing home and then tell me if it really is any different here already.
That is only a possibility in a country where socialism has taken hold recently. In a country of mature socialism at no point in life would anyone have much money or assets.
You know, I don’t want to sound harsh, but isn’t this why you have a family? I take care of my mom and dad who are in their 70s as best I can when they need help. When the time comes they’ll probably move in with me. My brother and sister help too. In times past this is how it was done. Don’t rely on the government!
When you pay into a system, as the British are forced to do with socialized medicine and as the left is trying to force on America, you expect to receive the care that you have ALREADY PAID FOR.
Let's say that you have regular health insurance, like most Americans, and you need to go to the doctor and the cost of the doctor visit is $250.00. Should you pay the standard 20% copay of $50.00 or should the insurance company be able to make you pay the full $250.00 because you have the money to pay for it?
What the elitists do not see is that if the lens truly searches for the greatest good, it would be that the elitists are the ones eliminated.
Men that might become politicians and vote against the swelling elitist class ..
Men that might become financiers that would really .. honest to God .. invest people's money that was actually legal and would return a profit ..
Men that would work hard, teach their children about America and hard work and would be smart enough to not allow any enemy ... foreign or domestic ... threaten the life they had developed.
Men that grew up with John Wayne and Norman Rockwell and Buffalo Bob Smith and The Lone Ranger ..
Men who believed somrthing.
Viet Nam was genocide
Although I know that *my* old age won't be nearly as safe and comfortable as was my Dad's (thanks to the Rat Party having recently painted a bullseye on the backs of older people) I'm happy to say that the first 6+ decades of my life were quite good despite the Rat Party's efforts to steal everything I have from me and give to worthless welfare parasites.
Now we sit here worrying about when they will come for our money.
No one who has ever sat down with a Brit and discussed the NHS would have ever bought into Obamacare.
Interesting take on Vietnam. Never thought about it in that respect.
Why should he be punished for being successful?
Why isn’t he deserving of a return and benefit of the money he put in to the system as insurance against future needs just as much as anyone else or more so?
He probably contributed more than many others why shouldn’t he benefit just as much if not more?
Why should he have had to pay taxes to pay for home care for anyone else when they had just the same opportunities to prosper and earn enough money to care for themselves just as he was able to in your eyes?
When you have made lifetime “contributions” to the social security trust fund, “contributions” that were supposedly yours alone and for your benefit alone that approach a million dollars tell me what your heart says when the government says, “you saved too much money in other places. What we told you about a return on your “contributions”? We aren’t doing that. We spent all your “contributions” on people who weren’t as successful as you.”
Never mind that you worked 16 or 18 hour days, gave up vacations and paid huge tax bills year after year.... you were too successful so the government is going to penalize you.
Considering your comment I expect you will never understand the logic I’ve just presented.
I just hope I will be able to care for him in our home. the VA care he's gotten is OK as far as we know, but I never know whether they just put a band aide on it or if they really are looking out for him.
read the article
they didn’t have enough money to pay for home health care
the govt will only pay for full nursing care for poor people- more expensive
thus they encourage people to die to save the state money
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