NHS – SENTENCING PATIENTS TO DEATH…
By David Vance On December 29th, 2012The NHS is cruel and operates death panels in an increasingly overt manner;
Last night, as she has done every night for the past eight months, May James visited her husband in hospital and asked him how he was. Despite the fact he breathes via a ventilator and, since undergoing a tracheotomy (the surgical opening of an airway in the neck), can speak only in a whisper or mouth the words, his response was typically cheery. ‘Smashing,’ he said. Poignant enough, you may think. But recently David’s determined positivity has taken on a particularly heartbreaking resonance, given that his family — May, his wife of 50 years, and their children Julie, 48, David, 45, and Paul, 37 — believe he may have just days to live. For three days before Christmas, the hospital trust treating the retired musician won a landmark legal case that ruled they could withhold treatment if his condition deteriorates. His family, who have fought the hospital in the courts every step of the way, believe David has been handed a barbaric death sentence. ‘It’s legalised murder,’ says Julie, a civil servant.
It’s socialised medicine and Americans better get used to the idea because this is what happens when you pretend that healthcare can be “free”!
Healthcare has never be ‘free’ it’s bought and paid for through taxes, the government, or the State does not provide one single brass penny of it’s own, it does not have any money, only what it steals by force from the serfs.
Who here or elsewhere has said that healthcare was free?
None one, but don’t interrupt the man when he’s pretending.
And interrupt David when he’s pretending the NHS hands out death sentences!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/03/patients-sue-nhs-access-drugs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9165629/Elderly-dying-due-to-despicable-age-discrimination-in-NHS.html
I’m sure it’ll be some comfort to the family that a state apparatchik deciding when you will be left to die is the envy of the world. God forbid that a firm should charge to keep him alive.
Still, another family has discovered that the state is not their friend. When it’s convenient, you will be marked for death.
Mr James’ daughter describes the death sentence as “legalised murder”. That’s exactly what it is, and the regime which has done it is illegitimate. The family owes no loyalty and no taxes to it.
they do hand out death sentences, and death panels exist now on both sides of the pond.
Aren’t we the civilized lot.
” a state apparatchik deciding when you will be left to die is the envy of the world. God forbid that a firm should charge to keep him alive.”
Firms can and do charge. Of course they won’t keep him alive if his condition is hopeless.
You’re paying, are you?
Or are you murdering him too?
Phantom, on December 29th, 2012 at 1:58 PM Said:
Who here or elsewhere has said that healthcare was free?
Have you found them glasses yet?
They are probably on the top of your head.
Good grief, still never mind you managed to make the other two look stupid as well
I’m already paying, Frank. I’d much prefer to be given a choice.
How foreigners must envy us our communist slaughterhouses.
“I’m already paying, Frank. I’d much prefer to be given a choice.”
You mean you want to be able to *choose* to refrain from providing care?
I thought you said that was murder?
Frank O’Dwyer -
I want the freedom to refrain from paying for health services when I don’t need them.
I’m off to Waitrose soon. No-one there will force me to buy stuff I don’t want.
“I want the freedom to refrain from paying for health services when I don’t need them.”
And when somebody else needs them, you’ll be paying, yes?
Or will you just murder them?
Frank O’Dwyer -
When someone else is peckish I don’t starve them by not paying for their food. Almost everyone earns more than enough in their lives to pay for their own health treatment, even at current (inflated by government) costs.
The idea that you and I are taxed now to pay for the treatment of those who have been robbed of hundreds of thousands of pounds in their lives is absurd.
Those who would deny any state involvement in providing for any health service have some brass neck in criticizing the withholding of any service by the state when the service they wish the state to provide is zero.
And please provide a full list of the private insurance companies or other medical firms that cover everything regardless of cost. Or I will do it for you- there are none.
Some brass, some neck.
Of course private provision doesn’t cover everything (as it once did). It’s crowded out by the state behemoth.
Right, off out to the supermarket, where I’ll peacefully interact with millions and choose what low-price delicacies from around the world I want to buy.
Gosh, markets are miraculous things.
“When someone else is peckish I don’t starve them by not paying for their food. ”
Yet if the NHS did that you’d say it’s murder.
“Almost everyone earns more than enough in their lives to pay for their own health treatment”
I’m sure that’ll be some comfort to the family of ‘almost nobody’.
Anyway I’ll take that as a no. You won’t be paying, so by your own logic you are guilty of murder.
Private systems never covered everyone, esp those who were poor, and they never covered every service. There are many good private systems in the world now, but they don’t cover every one or every thing. They’d go broke if they tried to. Not a criticism, an observation.
People who stick to the falsehood of death panels are just going to continue to repeat their error. It isn’t debate.
Private insurance would have a hell of a job covering all the conditions treatable nowadays and the treatments available. Ths will get worse which is the downside of medical advances.
Yes.
And the downside of the good that is longer lifespans is more frail elderly who need a lot more extended care than an 15 year old who breaks his arm does.
“Right, off out to the supermarket, where I’ll peacefully interact with millions and choose what low-price delicacies from around the world I want to buy.”
Moments ago you were saying everyone is so impoverished by taxes that they can’t afford to help themselves, never mind this man who you claim is not only a victim of robbery to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds, but now being prepared for murder?
The price of the Daily Mail (that reports the ‘murder’ claim) is 55p and its average circulation is something like 2 million a day. That’s on the order of £1M the daily mail readers could provide to whatever they claim this guy’s care should be just by skipping one days fodder for their craw thumping.
Of course they won’t because they can think of better things to spend their money on. In addition to buying the rag they’ll visit Waitrose, buy christmas crackers, order a chinese, at many multiples of the cost. It’s almost as if they don’t believe their own bull.
Aileen,
“Private insurance would have a hell of a job covering all the conditions treatable nowadays and the treatments available”
Private insurance also goes to very expensive treatments for the wealthy (even where there’s a slim chance of success or the treatment is not particularly necessary) at the expense of more cost-effective and mundane treatments for those with less money but much greater need and/or better chances.
It’s also very obviously more in the interests of insurers to let people die than it is to keep them alive indefinitely with expensive interventions. Somehow the free market is supposed to ignore this obvious incentive.
Private medicane care can and does coexist with socialized medical care ( I’m not afraid of the socialized word, kiddie poos )
If some rich guy pays $100,000 a day on a speculative treatment that has a low probability of success, that’s not depriving the poor of anything, any more than veterinary hospitals take resources away from cancer centers for humans. There is no ” at the expense ” consideration to be made, unless we’re rationing the number of total doctors / nurses / medicines in an overall society. Which would make no sense.
But yes, all insurers / payers –every one of them, public and private think about costs, and cost/benefit analyses, and what makes sense morally.
The right wing side here are the ultimate rationers – they want the poor to have a ration of zero, outside the option of chartiy from the public.
Phantom
I’d go further. The guy paying $100.000 a day on speculative treatment could well be contributing significantly to the sum of medical knowledge. Accepted treatments were speculative once.
I think beyond the question of private or NHS treatment is the more mportant issue of putting more emphasis on health as opposed to illness than we do know.
We should be exploring health and trying to have more of it not just exploring illness and trying to eradicate it.
Frank O’Dwyer -
By my logic, if I take someone into care and purposely deny him food to ensure he dies, I would be guilty of murder.
If I had taken his funds first, on the promise that he will be cared for, I would also be guilty of a particularly grim deception.
Aileen
All you say here is spot on.
And the rich guy is proving jobs to everyone in the hospital too! Private health systems are huge job machines, including the phenonenon of such centers in the developing world and Singapore etc that attract customers from the US and Europe.
The last sentance is especially true. You need to really be your own physician to an extent. Learn as much as you can, do what you can to stay healthy and robust, and stay out sick bay as much as possible.
“It’s also very obviously more in the interests of insurers to let people die than it is to keep them alive indefinitely with expensive interventions.”
You wouldn’t use that insurer, particularly if its officers are sued by bereaved relatives. Such a firm would soon go out of business if it operated on this NHS model.
And who says that insurers would be the recourse if the state withdrew from health rationing? There are endless potential ways that markets would use to meet demand. It may even be that costs would plummet so precipitously that insurance would die, or become a small, niche industry.
I’ve said it before lads and it bears repeating: if we had a National Food Service, rationing food the way the laughably-names NHS does, and rationing food the way the state did for more than a decade did after WW2, you’d be making the very same arguments for its retention.
You’d be saying that private players cannot meet food demand. You’d be saying that the poor will not be able to afford that delicious spam and powdered egg concoction that the state can deliver in just a fortnight. You’d be saying that food is too important to be left to the ravages of the profit motive.
Come on, ‘fess up. You know you’d be saying that because you say exactly that to defend the state’s rationing of vastly over priced and under quality health care.
In markets where there is not the effective regulatory hand that exists in the US and EU, such as Mexico, it is also true that medical scams that prey on the desperate are far more common than in our own countries.
These are not problems that the market alone – any more than govt alone – can ever deal with effectively. And some of us have said this for some years now. It is a vastly more complex issue than delivering quality seeded rye breads to our supermarkets.
the right wing side here are the ultimate rationers – they want the poor to have a ration of zero, outside the option of chartiy from the public.
Phantom, exactly.
Phantom
I have often heard psychiatrists saying that they had attended hundreds of lectures and seminars about mental illness and none on mental health. They are well up on the ins and outs of misery and despair but zilch on happiness and contentment.
I have heard similar things re medicine in general. We need more looking at healthy people and what has them and keeps them that way.
Aileen
I agree totally. But unfortunately the NHS will be soon be swamped by the tidal wave of obesity and its close relative, diabetes. Something needs to be done to curb the consumption of junk food and sugary soft drinks. But that would mean taxes, and we can predict the headlines in the Daily Mail to any attack on their advertisers.
I hope the government manages to save the poor from obesity.
“You wouldn’t use that insurer”
Those insurers. Those being all the insurers.
Pete Moore
You support the nanny stage ban on marijuana. But junk food is a much bigger killer.
“By my logic, if I take someone into care and purposely deny him food to ensure he dies, I would be guilty of murder.”
You think you’re better because you wouldn’t take them into care in the first place?
Nobody’s stopping you from footing the bill and helping the families provide ‘food’. Of course the patients will most likely die in short order anyway after you’ve subjected them to additional indignity and agony, so lucky for them your concern for their welfare is much more theoretical than practical.
Insurance is a lot more complex than people think. For things like health insurance or products liability insurance, it takes years to learn the essential nooks and crannies.
The average person does not know the entire market, and could never be expected to.
Absent regulation, there are many games that the insurance companies can play against the average person, just as there are many games that the banks and credit card companies can play to the average guy.
The private insurer is in business to make money for itself. By charging as much as it can and by spending as little as it can in claims. Never forget that.
Absent regulation, the company that is happy to take you on when you’re hale and hearty at the age of 20 won’t want to know you when you’re 60 and have a hard to treat condition.
Don’t have blind trust in the government but don’t put blind trust in the market either. For many reasons, including that men are not angels and that there is no affordable market for a 60 year old with a preexisting condition that’s hard to solve.
Peter
I don’t think that that will work (if you mean tax the sugary drinks etc as opposed tax being needed to fund different initiatives).
I don’t have ideological objections to it as in if I thought it woukd work, I woukd support it. I just think that a likely outcome woukd be that poorer families would have less money for the healthy food.
I think more should be done to encourage physical activity amongst children. I don’t mean the boring and often dreadful PE but more old fashioned games. We never played tig in PE but we often did it at break time – great fun especially the variations like “gang tig” and “under the legs tig” where you had a better chance of playing a full part even if you weren’t athletic.
For those of work age, I think a poor work life balance leads to a poor diet. I am hoping to take early retirement ths year and my main objective is to focus on my health – (want to be taking my pension for years just to wind Pete up!
) – something I just don’t have the chance to do now. Work canteens could be a lot better. Our canteen does wonderful soups presented as a healthy option – great – except they serve it with deep fried croutons!
Peter -
Marijuana is effectively decriminalised. I have no problem with an explicit decriminalisation. You should know this because I have told you so a few times. What I will never support are taxes on it and the state making me pay for its effects on someone else. Frazzle your brain if you like, but I’m not liable for the consequences.
The way to kill the junk food industry is to do away with the welfare state.
The greatest killer is that state-sanctioned, high-carb, low-fat diet. Nothing makes you obese faster than that.
Frank O’Dwyer -
” .. so lucky for them your concern for their welfare is much more theoretical than practical.”
I’d love to have a debate with you, but half the time you’re imagining my views. It’s difficult to respond to that. And my concern for others was more than theoretical when I dropped a lump of cash on your sponsored bike ride.
Hang on, hang on.
What do people think the NHS is if it’s not a state-operated insurance pool?
We can have one Stalinist insurer which exists for its own benefit, or many private operators responding to competitive economic forces. Economic history is quite clear on the superior model.
Marijuana is effectively decriminalised
No, there are thousands in jail because of it.
And the junk food industry needs to pay the costs it imposes on our society, instead of externalising them. A 50% rate of Vat would work wonders.
Peter -
The junk food industry doesn’t externalise costs on society (if you mean, for example, costs of treating obesity and other conditions in the NHS).
The state has imposed those costs on everyone else.
Right, I’ve avoided the radio and I’m off now to watch the Arsenal vs Newcastle match I recorded. As if there isn’t enough madness around today.
Up the Gunners.
Pete
It doesn’t matter whether the obese are treated by the NHS or Bupa. The costs are externalised by the junk food corporations, because they pay nothing towards cleaning up their mess.
Aileen,
“For those of work age, I think a poor work life balance leads to a poor diet. ”
Have you seen this?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/9480451/The-52-diet-can-it-help-you-lose-weight-and-live-longer.html
(The tl;dr is a diet involving 2 days of fasting – 500 calories for women, 600 for men, and 5 days of eating what you want. Many benefits with a fair amount of science to back it up – there is also a horizon program about it that is pretty interesting).
Frank
I think that that has a lot if merit.
I have lost and put on a football team in weight over the years. The diets that never worked were those which involved ANY type of moderation.
When I was at Queens I made up my own diet, which was eating nothing and eating anything on alternate days. I lost a lot.
I later lost a lot on the Carbohydrate Addicts diet which was basically meant two very low carb meals with one hour where you eat anything you like and as much of it but you must stick totally within the hour. I was eating far more than I usually did at the start but still losing weight. It totally got rid of food cravings and indeed it got to be a challange after a while to eat enough in the hour. It totally challanged the notion that losing weight is merely about eating less and exercising more.
My problem is not being up to the organisation that it requires (not excessive but a challange with dyspraxia and ADD). I hope to follow this plan properly when I retire. There is a maintenance plan to it too. You introduce carbs gradually outside your hour until you get to your tipping point for putting on weight.
Aileen,
“When I was at Queens I made up my own diet, which was eating nothing and eating anything on alternate days. I lost a lot.”
That is one of the diets mentioned on the programme. As long as you keep to it, it has a lot of benefits over and above weight loss.
Frank
It does point up that there is a difference between a healthy weight loss and not so healthy one. I think that I stumbled on something that did work re merely losing weight but I am sure my nutrition was generally rubbish as that was what I was eating on the alternate days. If I had actually eaten well nutritionally on the alternate days, I woukd probably have had an ce regime. If I remember properly I was only dizzy etc for the first few days.
The same for the Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet. If you stick to it you do lose weight, even if you spend your hour eating lard and drinking cooking oil. You really vamp up the healthy bit though if your hour is full of oatmeal, veg and fruit.
They do say though that losing weight in itself is a healthy thing however you do it as long as you keep it off. So if you take the weight off and then try and improve your nutrition, that’s ok.
“I think that I stumbled on something that did work re merely losing weight but I am sure my nutrition was generally rubbish as that was what I was eating on the alternate days. If I had actually eaten well nutritionally on the alternate days, I woukd probably have had an ce regime”
Actually of the surprising findings they mentioned is that it did not matter (in terms of the benefits found) what people ate on the alternate days. People who ate high fat, burgers etc on the alternate days got all the same benefits, and generally people did not eat as much as they would have overall anyway (i.e. you’d have to eat 175% normal on alternate days to make up for the 25% normal on the ‘fast’ days, and people didn’t do that on average, more like 110%).
The NHS does not exist only to benefit itself.
It benefits many who reside in the UK which is why you are a fairly healthy and long lived country. You do not I believe have the phenomenon of people bankrupting themselves over huge hospital bills like you do in the US.
We’re a fairly healthy and long-lived people because of wealth. Always and everywhere nutrition and health gains with wealth. So we’ll chalk that up to the capitalism and markets which somehow cling on despite state degradations.
Britons don’t bankrupt themselves. The state inflicts bankruptcy on them. Then the state comes to the rescue of ill, elderly bankruptees, then drones estoll the virtues of the paternalistic communism which bankrupted the people in the first pace.
Pete
Well said. A shareholder in Coca Cola couldn’t have put it better. The state tolerates certain health destroyers and prosecutes others. And ideoolgues like you give it cover.
Frank
I was trying to say that (in a roundabout way) – the weight loss happens just as well if you eat crap as long as you stick the overall rules and weightloss if you are overweight is potentially the most important thing you can do for yourself.
I still think for ongoing health benefits you are probably better to substitute a bit of fruit and veg for the deep fried Mars bars!
“We’re a fairly healthy and long-lived people because of wealth. Always and everywhere nutrition and health gains with wealth.”
And wealthy in large part because of the existence of states, and not having to deal with (among other things) the stupendously high rates of (real) murder that are associated with the non-state societies that preceded them.
(Yes, higher even when you account for 20th century wars, famines, and all the rest).
Pete
You’re all so bankrupt that y’all have these nice computers to converse with, and are always going to France or Florida, and your fine restaurants in London are full most nights.
You are rich by world standards, very rich. Be happy.
Frank
If you are about. I have been reading more about the link you provided and it does look interesting. I am amazed to think tha my kooky diet has health benefits! I gave it up because I thought that it was specifically unhealthy even if it worked. I think I may give both the diets mentioned a go. I see that there are books about both.
I wonder how they adapt them for weight maintenance. How do you continue to get the other health benefits but don’t lose too much weight?