The conveyor belt
I always say that the second of the three essential prongs of “universal” health care will be an enthusiasm for euthanasia. The “right to die” will morph steadily into a “duty to die.” The elderly will come to recognize that a trip to the hospital is a virtual death sentence, where they will be put right onto the conveyor belt that takes them off to the crematorium.
Well, damn those Brits, don’t they know how to make me look like a genius. I think that Wes Smith gets a little too tangled up in the mistakes, which lets the ghastly concept itself recede from the foreground:
The UK’s Liverpool Care Pathway has apparently killed its first (reported) victim. The Pathway treats dying patients as members of a category instead of as individuals. Rather than give patients the individualized treatment their respective symptoms and conditions warrant, the Pathway sedates patients thought to be near death, and withholds food and fluids until death. About 16.5% of deaths in the UK are now, apparently, via the Pathway, a far higher percentage than hospice professionals tell me require sedation to control symptoms.
Yesterday, I reported on a case in which a woman misdiagnosed as dying, was spared dehydration only due to the persistence of her daughter. I asked at the time, how many other such cases there are? We now know of at least one–only the ending wasn’t happy. A man misdiagnosed with recurrent cancer was apparently sedated and dehydrated to death.
One of the obvious problems here is that everyone, particularly the elderly, can be said to be dying, and you have to know that termination dates are going to get called earlier on judgments way abstract because, you know, the central bureaucracy needs good numbers to show it’s all working. But you just have to stare in wonder at the name of this thing: The Pathway.