Tens of thousands of patients with terminal illnesses are placed on a “death pathway” to help end their lives every year. However, in a letter to The Daily Telegraph, six doctors warn that hospitals may be using the controversial scheme to reduce strain on hospital resources.
Supporters of the Liverpool Care Pathway, which allows medical staff to withhold fluid and drugs in a patient’s final days, claim it is the kindest way of letting them slip away. But the experts say in their letter that natural deaths are often freer of pain and distress.
Informed consent is not always being sought by doctors, who fail to ask patients about their wishes while they are still in control of their faculties, warn the six. This has led to an increase in patients carrying cards informing doctors that they do not wish to be put on the pathway in the last few days of their lives.
The six doctors are experts in elderly care and wrote the letter in conjunction with the Medical Ethics Alliance, a Christian medical organisation. They say that many members of the public have contacted them with examples of inappropriate use of the pathway, which is implemented in up to 29 per cent of hospital deaths.
They warn that there is no “scientific way of diagnosing imminent death.” They write: “It is essentially a prediction, and it is possible that other considerations may come into reaching such a decision, not excluding the availability of resources.”
Sure, it's England, but the same rules apply. Under rationed socialized medicine paid for by extracting the money by governments through taxation or forced insurance purchase mandate the end user is the best source of cost-control. As the elderly and sickly reach a death threshold it makes economic sense to nudge them over the edge. At least under a capitalist system some people have a fighting chance and those with the financial means are funding the research to make the entire system more advanced and useful to all.
This is the future of healthcare under Obamacare.
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