Rupert Darwall’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on why we should officially end our enthrallment with government-administered national health care schemes offers important focus on what actually goes on in the National Health Service in Britain. Darwall effectively addresses the mythology offered by the Obama administration and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the blessings of government-directed health and medical services. A few salient quotes from the piece:
“a group of senior doctors and health-care experts wrote to a national newspaper expressing their concern about the Liverpool Care Pathway, a palliative program being rolled out across the NHS involving the withdrawal of fluids and nourishment for patients thought to be dying. Noting that in 2007-08, 16.5% of deaths in the U.K. came after “terminal sedation,” their letter concluded with the chilling observation that experienced doctors know that sometimes “when all but essential drugs are stopped, ‘dying’ patients get better” if they are allowed to.”
and
“The real justification for socialized medicine is left unstated: Because health-care resources are assumed to be fixed, those resources should be prioritized for those who can benefit most from medical treatment. Thus the NHS acts as Britain’s national triage service, deciding who is most likely to respond best to treatment and allocating health care accordingly.
“It should therefore come as no surprise that the NHS is institutionally ageist. The elderly have fewer years left to them; why then should they get health-care resources that would benefit a younger person more? An analysis by a senior U.K.-based health-care expert earlier this decade found that in the U.S. health-care spending per capita goes up steeply for the elderly, while the U.K. didn’t show the same pattern. The U.K.’s pattern of health-care spending by age had more in common with the former Soviet bloc.”
This is why I (and I’m sure I’m not alone) referred to older patients in the U.S. as reaching their “health care expiration dates” under any likely version of Dem/ObamaCare.