SOCIALIZED MEDICINE: FOSTERING A CULTURE OF DEATH

I'm a day or two late in commenting about this article, but This is what medicine has come to under Great Britain's National Health Service:

AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened.

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients.

Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying.

Fenton’s daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

Ball, 42, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”

And, along the same line, here are a few related links:
Doctors say EU working week is killing patients
Families 'kept in dark' by doctors over dying

It's easy to say that the idea of "Death Panels" in Obamacare is ridiculous and simply "fearmongering" on the part of the right; but what people need to understand is how socialized medicine fosters a culture of death in medical personnel and patients alike.

It shouldn't be hard to appreciate the idea that state-sponsored medicine is always at exceedingly high risk of under-valuing individual human life. After all, it's right there in the fine print of Marxist, socialist, or communist manifestos, all of which expound on the idea that, the needs of the collective take precedence over those of the individual.

With that as your fundamental premise, it naturally follows that one human life is not particularly important, especially when that life comes into conflict with the State's priorities.

And one of the priorities of any State is always the financial bottom line.

Now, you might think that such a philosophy applied to physicians in medical practice ("First, do no harm!") would not fly--but then you probably did not read the articles I linked to above. Some doctor had to write an order discontinuing the antibiotics; and to take out the feeding tube. That doctor chose (or, perhaps had no choice) to follow the instructions of the carefully laid out "Pathway Plan" for patients like Mrs.Fenton.

For those unlucky enough to be sick under State-sponsored medical programs, the philosophy of the State--not that of the individual doctor--is the default when determining the particulars of patient care.

I mean, why would the State waste resources on someone like the 80 year old Mrs. Fenton? What can she do at her age to contribute to the collective, except to drain it of its precious financial resources? Let her starve to death...but be sure and do it compassionately. QED.

A sad corollary of such a system is that when a physician allows himself to become a mere instrument of the state, there is no level to which he will not sink to please his masters; and he will even eventually override his own humanity in that service if that is what is called for. Whatever high ideals he starts out with, he is eventually sucked into promoting the state's perspective--even to writing the order so that all the Mrs. Fentons out there die of starvation. He will do this because he has accepted the proposition that the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few.

As Darlene at Protein Wisdom notes:

“The Pathway Plan” sounds very much like Dr. Zeke’s Complete Lives System… shorter: when it is determined by Those.Who.Know.Best that you are not useful to the collective, you die.

So, if you want to see how "Death Panels" work in a health care utopia, then all you have to do is look at any State-run health care system on the planet--because they all end up fostering a culture of death.