Posted on 06/05/2015 4:07:43 AM PDT by HomerBohn
Elderly people in the United Kingdom and potentially worldwide are likely to be treated as “second-class citizens” and even denied life-saving medical treatment under proposed “highly unethical” United Nations “death targets,” healthcare and aging experts declared in an open letter last week.
The radical UN “Sustainable Development Goals,” which would put virtually every realm of human activity in the crosshairs, include, among other controversial provisions, proposed global “targets” for reducing premature deaths from various causes. To meet those targets, the experts said, government-run healthcare systems such as the U.K. “National Health Service” (NHS) are likely to focus more resources on easier-to-save younger people — at the expense of the elderly whose deaths would not be counted as “premature.” Some critics are even saying the plan heralds the advent of “death panels.”
Officially dubbed the UN “Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals,” the plot being pushed by the UN and its member regimes represents a brazen attack on liberty, self-government, markets, national sovereignty, and more — all under the guise of “solving” all of the world’s real and imagined problems.
The death targets are merely one tiny component that includes everything from “education” and values to food and health. The specific “Sustainable Development Goals,” set to replace the “Millennium Development Goals” established in 2000, are still being hammered out by UN bureaucrats and UN member regimes. Everything from “ending poverty” and “ending hunger” to “achieving gender equality” and “reducing income equality within and between countries” over 15 years is on the agenda. Imagine the coercive powers and the massive amount of resources required to even attempt such scheming.
Now, at least one component of the agenda — the age discrimination in healthcare — is coming under heavy criticism in the United Kingdom. In the open letter published by the prominent medical journal The Lancet and widely reported in the British press, the international coalition of experts lambasted the sought-after UN goal and demanded that it be scrapped or revised. Blasting the ideas as “agist” — discrimination against individuals based on their age — the signatories argued that the concept of “premature mortality” has the potential to “undermine the cherished, fundamental principle of health as a universal right for all.”
The letter specifically criticizes a previous article on the subject that it says is based on “ethical principles” that “are deeply troubling” — namely, “that people aged 70 years and above do not matter.”
The signatories also argue that agist discrimination is already strong in areas such as cancer treatment even in high-income countries, and the situation is worse still in poorer nations. In the U.K., as The New American and many other sources have been documenting for years, the government-run healthcare monopoly known as NHS is already infamous for killing off the elderly and denying necessary care to patients.
Last year, the U.K. Royal College of Surgeons, stating what was already well known, declared that elderly patients were being denied crucial treatment and operations due to such discrimination, according to British media reports. A few years before that, a British doctor warned that the socialist-style NHS was euthanizing as many as 130,000 patients each year through a controversial end-of-life “care” method called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP).
According to the letter in The Lancet, even if it is not the intent of those promoting the premature death targets, the inclusion of such goals in the UN “Sustainable Development Goals,” set to be adopted in September, “will inevitably reinforce the ageist bias that pervades many aspects of health-care decision making.” “A chronologically exclusive premature mortality target sends out a strong signal that years lived beyond a given age, such as 60 years or 70 years, are intrinsically less valuable than those of a younger person,” the letter states. “This misconception builds on a flawed tradition in health-care priority setting, which includes an explicit bias against older people (as opposed to people of so-called economically and socially productive ages).”
The experts on aging who signed the letter — associated with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Institute for Ageing and Health at Newcastle University, the Alzheimer’s Society, Age UK, and HelpAge — were led by Peter Lloyd-Sherlock. Speaking to the U.K. Telegraph, the professor of social policy and international development at the University of East Anglia said: “This premature mortality target is highly unethical, since it unjustifiably discriminates against older people.” He also noted that there is already age discrimination in cancer care and surgery, but that the UN targets would give the agism the “stamp of approval.” However, the targets are “not quite set in stone yet, so we have a final opportunity to impress upon the UN the need to alter this explicitly ageist health target.” If that does not happen, he warned ominously, “people aged 70 and over will become second-class citizens as far as health policy is concerned.”
Lost amid the whole debate over the UN death targets and agism in healthcare, though, are several crucial overarching questions that must be addressed and are more important even than the discrimination debate. First of all, why is the UN — widely and properly ridiculed as the “dictators club” for its autocratic membership roster — setting “targets” and making 15-year “agendas” that will influence or even dictate national policy to begin with? Are the British and their elected representatives incapable of governing themselves without UN “targets” to guide their decisions? As the British struggle to free themselves from the European Union super-state, why is it accepted as inevitable that the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” will guide U.K. policy on healthcare or anything else? Allowing Third World dictators to tell the once proud British people how to run their affairs should be seen as a disgrace — and it should be firmly rejected.
Second of all, why is the government involved in healthcare to begin with? Are citizens incapable of making their own medical decisions and looking after their own health without the nanny state? Considering the atrocious track record of the socialist-style NHS regime, it is way past time for the United Kingdom to abolish socialized medicine and allow the free market to work its magic. Allowing government to ration and control medical care — whether based on UN death targets or the whims of homegrown politicians and bureaucrats — has been shown conclusively to be a disaster, not to mention immoral. From euthanizing the elderly and urging them to sign “do not resuscitate” directives, to being consistently unable to meet the needs of patients, it is time for the NHS and similar socialized medicine regimes to be tossed on the ash heap of failed ideas with devastating and deadly consequences.
Finally, with the ongoing disaster that is the deeply unpopular “ObamaCare,” are Americans traveling down the same dark road as the British? Absolutely. As the outlandish and impossibly expensive “Affordable Care” system implodes in on itself, and costs continue to spiral out of control thanks to government intervention, calls are growing for a full-blown socialized system to take its place. Even without a so-called “single payer system,” though, ObamaCare represents a de facto nationalization of healthcare in America. And with the tacit support from the GOP majority in Congress, which continues to fund ObamaCare despite deceitful promises to voters and harsh rhetoric, Americans can look forward to a nightmarish healthcare future of rationing, discrimination against the elderly, no more privacy, and more — at least if nothing changes.
To solve many of the most urgent healthcare problems would be relatively simple — dismantle socialized medical systems, withdraw from the UN, and return to the eternal principles of liberty, responsibility, and national independence. However, for that to happen, the British and American publics must get educated, organized, and active, all in the face of a massive propaganda campaign by the UN. The alternative to stopping it — UN death targets, death panels, government rationing, “sustainable” tyranny, and more — must be crushed for the benefit of all.
How about guaranteeing that a government stop taxing its working constituents to pay for its deadbeats. That will help eliminate some inequality. Those that work should not carry the burden of shouldering the responsibility that others are unwilling to accept.
Trillions of dollars has been spent on "Ending Poverty" in this country in the last 50 years. And what has been the result? More of the same.
Look at the black race, once respectable, now a shambles. All because of Governmental intrusion.
Once prosperous California, has been turned into a basket case.
Every large city with a Democrat entrenched political establishment, is a crime ridden, job destroying, enclave that can't survive without being bailed out with money from other portions of the country.
Happens ever time.
Socialism does not work.
It was tried at Jamestown. They mostly starved to death. Then they turned to Capitalism, and flourished and grew. You are always willing to work harder and longer for YOURSELF.
But when it all gets put into "the pot" to be distributed equally to everyone there is no incentive to strive to do more, be better, to build a better place for yourself, when it gets divided amongst all, regardless of effort put in.
It only takes common sense to understand this, but hey, they don't teach that any more!
Brave New World...1984...Logan’s Run
FUUN
There was a name for this...
Agenda-something...
People talk now regularly about having kid/not having kisds long after the kids are in their home, going to school and taking from their parents. Tgreatening their parents’ time and resources. Instead of the June cleaver world and back to the 5000s BC during which time, because there was no choice, people were allowed to be at peace with their kids’ existence and just loved them...or not. But they shut up about the burdens they perceived their kids to be
The fact that they are always a blessing no matter what does not escape me
But now people just are allowed to hate their decision to have had kids
Nothing is more sick to society
And it is not abortion
It birth control
Sick
Neither Jamestown nor the Pilgrims tried socialism.
In both cases they were employees of a corporation on the other side of the ocean, which attempted to run things accordingly. Worked about as well as might be imagined. People shirked their duty to the boss whenever they could.
BTW, Jamestown and Virginia didn’t become prosperous till they started growing tobacco with slaves.
I think the English translation was, "Final Solution."
I was just thinking of “Carousel” from Logan’s Run.
Those colonists should have picked their own damned cotton and left the slaves on the Dark Continent.
Methinks “free” medical care is very, very expensive, indeed. Have the sniffles and need an aspirin, break an arm and need it cast, or desire a simple cholesterol test? No problem. Cost more to take care of than what you can contribute to the state? Prepare to be sent to the mulchers.
Sadly, people who rely on OPM to pay the bills really have no right to complain. Even worse, even well meaning government officials have no choice but to ration care at some point. Contrary to popular opinion, there’s no bottomless pit of money. Either spend the country into oblivion or start attaching strings to the handouts.
Sorry, but these criticisms, while possibly appropriate for details, are completely wrong in theory.
They ignore that resources for medical care, as for everything else, are limited. Therefore, tradeoffs are inevitable. It is simply not possible to provide absolute top of the line medical care to all. Not in any country, not now, not in the future.
If $100,000 is all that’s available to provide medical treatment to two individuals, one a five year old with leukemia, and the other an 85 year old smpker with lung cancer, to which one should the bulk of the funding go?
Spending $80k on the child has an excellent chance of providing her with 80 years of healthy and productive life. The same amount spent on the geezer will provide him with perhaps six months of a pain-filled and possibly demented existence.
And here I always thought pretending that such tradeoffs are not necessary was a liberal POV, that everybody can have everything at no cost.
Not that all such policies would in practice be appropriate, simply that in theory they are both inevitable and morally right.
What parent, for instance, would not prioritize lifesaving treatment for their child over their own?
The early Christian church tried socialism too...and failed.
2 Thessalonians 3:10 “For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.””
“...Prepare to be sent to the mulchers.”
Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian feature s with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these....
I decry socialized medicine. But for the UN to decide who will get health care and who not by age or sex or religion or anything is criminal
“What parent, for instance, would not prioritize lifesaving treatment for their child over their own?”
1.34 Billion children, killed by their own mothers since 1980, beg to differ.
Shame on you, Sherman.
This situation has nothing to do with someone's old granny lying in a hospital corridor and near death thanks to the withholding of medical treatment. We're not talking about trading our lives for our children.
You've given a clue as to which side you're on in the Obozocare debate.
FedGov
“First we take your money. Then we take your life.”
What? You think all this government largesse comes free? It’s the inevitable result of people looking to government as god.
People do the calculations and think they’re getting a good deal, but it comes with strings attached. Truth be told, some people come out on the upside of the redistributionist state, money wise, but it comes at a price. Wards of the state don’t get to choose, and any freebie can be taken away as quickly as it’s given.
Liberty is better. It may be a bit more messy at times, but at least you won’t be sent to the mulchers when you’re worth more dead than alive. Like I wrote, no one has a right to complain if they’re looking for a free ride on the OPM train.
And yet I’m supposed to go right on voting for a party that has never once seriously tried to cut off funding to this organization?
Nope. I'm opposed to it. But to give to the young and to let the old die because they are useless is tantamount to forced euthanasia or forced abortion...(or any abortion).
The story was about letting the old die in favor of the young, and that was what I was addressing
I don’t think that’s what Sherman meant.
It just comes down to limited resources. Medical care is not limitless. Government funding isn’t limitless. If people insist on government subsidized health care, rationing is inevitable. If rationing is inevitable, it will inevitably be based on factors like potential value to the state or political power.
If you aren’t connected to the politically powerful and your medical care costs too much, you’ll be denied it. If you’re lucky, they’ll at least offer a free injection to speed things along. That is exactly where this “free” health care stuff is heading, and people need to understand the cold, hard facts of it.
Think of it as a pyramid scheme. The first ones to go got a pretty good deal. Now more elderly are wising up, shedding assets, and looking to put government on the hook for their nursing homes and medical care. Except the pyramid either collapses or the “free” stuff is rationed.
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