Posted on 02/13/2015 10:44:40 AM PST by wagglebee
“Obamacare’s shoddy implementation doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of its great evil,” reported Breitbart late last year, referring to the healthcare rationing that is insidiously hidden within the pages of the evasive law. Perhaps the most alarming criterion of healthcare rationing found in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is the plan’s death panel language.
Democrats vehemently denied that death panels would play a role in the ACA, but the law itself states that doctors will be paid to have discussions with patients about living wills, advance directives, and end-of-life options.
Killing patients whose perceived utility is declining is not exclusively an American phenomenon. The idea has shaped the healthcare system in the UK for decades, where the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) has been a fixture of end-of-life care.
Unfortunately, however, the LCP has morphed into a utilitarian means of freeing hospital beds and lowering healthcare costs – the unavoidable slippery slope that is presented any time the value of human beings is measured in monetary terms (as socialized healthcare plans do). The LCP has been engulfed in controversy in recent years and has signaled a possible end to the program. After repeated cases of shocking abuse, LCP will be phased out through the elimination of pallative care options for patients in the final days or hours of life.
Similarly, Australia has just released a 29-point checklist to be used by physicians to determine whether an elderly person is likely to die within 30 days. The checklist includes criteria such as low blood pressure, high- or low pulse, hypoglycemia, and low urinary output. But critics of the checklist posit the fact that human beings routinely defy mathematical odds and believe that aligning the probabilities of life or death with a checklist is demeaning.
With the ACA, America descends down the same dangerous paths. In addition to the ACA’s death panel language, there are shocking discrepancies between mainstream medical recommendations for preventive and diagnostic care, and provisions for such care as recommended by the federal government.
The US Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF) is the Congress-appointed body whose job is to recommend guidelines for preventive services, screenings, and medications. In conjunction with Obamacare, the Task Force recommendations have become conspicuously stingier.
For example, the Task Force only recommends routine mammograms for women ages 50-74, while the Mayo Clinic and the American Cancer Society both recommend annual mammograms for women over age 40 (without the cap at age 74). In fact, findings from a large study indicate that breast cancer deaths decreased by nearly 30% in women who obtained annual screenings starting at age 40. Similar discrepancies exist between Task Force recommendations for colonoscopies and prostate cancer screenings, and those of widely-respected medical associations.
According to the Annals of Family Medicine, Breitbart continues, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (currently Sylvia Burwell; formerly disgraced Kathleen Sebelius) possesses the power to add and remove preventive services based on their rating by the Preventive Services Task Force. Checks and balances? We think not.
LifeNews Note: Reprinted with permission from Texas Right to Life.
So how come labor politician and socialist Attlee got elected over conservative war hero Churchill after WWII.....?
Answer.,.....he lied...promised free medical care for the returning soldiers and their families....
Once elected the labor party promptly nationalized coal, electricity, transport, railways and hospitals,....food rationing extended to mid 50's
I would bet that the wun would love a bust of ole Clem.
btt
Note that the Supreme Court refused to get involved in the Terri Shiavo case because it was a state power issue.
I have no doubt that the people running healthcare companies will pay themselves bonus money for killing people.
Bob: We need to move more people to the cemetery to cut costs.
Roger: You are right, I want a new swimming pool and the bonus money will come in handy.
I didn’t see a list, but then I didn’t click on all the hot links, either.
Elderly Person = 99% of Congress
See Post #7
the Liverpool pathway was supposed to be for folks whose pain could not be controlled any other way. Alas, soon it morphed into killing people faster.
Similarly, not giving IV fluids and feeding tubes is a nuanced decision (in multisystem failure, these things only prolong the dying process...
in the comatose, a feeding tube leads to pneumonia and death within six months, so it doesn’t really prolong life if the person can’t swallow. The problem is that often these are inserted because the nursing homes lack staff to spoon feed these people, which takes time to do carefully... This is why I doubt Terri Schiavo was PVS).
In recent years, not giving fluid and hydration by IV or tube too has morphed into killing the inconvenient, even to the extend that some “ethicists” would deny spoon feeding of the brain damaged. This is why Pope John Paul II changed the church law on feeding tubes and insisted they be used if a person was merely handicapped and not terminal.
Of course, nowadays, the term “terminal illness” is being stretched to include lots of diseases that can be treated.
Diabetic and needing dialysis is expensive, so watch carefully when the “experts” start denying this treatment...
don’t bash immigration. Hispanics and Filipinos and Muslims don’t kill their elderly parents.
That’s one reason we retired to the Philippines....
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