"Death Panels? Of Course Not! We Just Want A British Style NHS! Or Maybe Not."

Uh, yeah.

Once government takes over health care, we won’t see death panels. We’ve been repeatedly assured of this by the Obama administration and the national media. At least thus far, they’re right, but our friends in the UK apparently aren’t as fortunate. A group of doctors have blown the whistle on the NHS for suspending hydration to supposedly terminally ill patients to hasten their demises:

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.

But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

These actions did not result from instructions in living wills, or from demands by next of kin. Patients got killed through sedated dehydration in order to save time and money for the resource-strapped NHS. It’s called the “death pathway,” initially designed as a humane way of hastening death in the final hours. However, the application has broadened to more diseases and diagnoses than its formerly narrow scope, and the triggers have become more ambiguous. That leads, these doctors warn, to a self-fulfilling prophecy of death when it might be avoided.

See, this is the way politics works in this society. You have the left wing of the political spectrum which is constantly telling us, "No! We don't actually want to impose the radical prescriptions you hear about from those complainers on the right. Oh sure, we buy the books of the radicals; we hire them to speak to us; we make sure they have tenured positions in academia; but that doesn't mean we want to do what they advocate!"

So, what we have been fed over the last month is all this junk about how great the NHS is in Britain, in the following fashion.

"Oh, what we really want is..."

[pause to look at a sheet of polling data]

"...hmm...yeah...insurance reform! Yeah, that's the ticket. So, don't believe those, including ourselves, who have claimed we are trying to institute a NHS style of system in an underhand fashion. But even if we were doing it, that wouldn't be bad because the NHS is damn near perfect! Much better than American care. Not that we want it anyway."

It's enough to give a rational person more than a headache.