There they go again. The central planners at the NHS want GPs to make a list of patients likely to die so they can receive differing care.
GPs have been asked to select one in every 100 of their patients to go on a list of those likely to die over the next 12 months. The patients will be singled out for ‘end-of-life care’, potentially saving the NHS more than 1£ billion a year. The listed patients may be asked to say where they would prefer to die and should be told they can draw up a ‘living will’ by which they can instruct doctors to withdraw life-saving treatment if they become incapacitated in hospital…
Information for GPs on what happens to such patients said they would be ‘less likely to be subject to treatments of limited clinical value’. It added that a quarter of all hospital beds are occupied by dying people and said that four in ten have no medical need to be there. If each had one less emergency admission into hospital in their last weeks and months, that would save the NHS £1.35billion a year, the material said.
Note the focus on money and denying patients fully informed choices.
The relevance for us in the USA is obvious. Obamacare will transform medicine from an individualized pursuit into one generally controlled by technocrats and bureaucracies. At that point, people cease to be patients and assigned various categories. That not only adds unnecessary complexity and expense, but depersonalizes in the extreme.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, J.D., is a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. He writes at his blog, Secondhand Smoke.
