Obamacare: “Harardous Pathway,” The Road to
Death Panels
I have a piece in today’s NRO about the Liverpool Care Pathway, which
we have discussed here previously at SHS. From
my
column:
The United Kingdom continues to provide vivid warnings about the
dangers of centralized health-care planning — a real possibility under
Obamacare. Within the last few years, the U.K.’s notorious rationing
board, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
(NICE), urged hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices to follow an
end-of-life protocol known as the Liverpool Care Pathway. The Pathway’s
guidelines instruct doctors to put patients thought to be near death
into a drug-induced coma, after which all food and fluids, as well as
medical treatments such as antibiotics, are withdrawn until death.
The problem with such a protocol is that no matter how well motivated —
and undoubtedly, the Pathway’s creators had good intentions —
follow-the-dots medical protocols often lead to patients’ being treated
as members of a category rather than as individuals. At that point,
nuance often goes out the door, and mistakes, neglect, and even
oppression frequently follow.
I get into some of the horror stories, such as the man put into a coma
and dehydrated who
turned
out not to have cancer. And then I tie the Pathway
into Obamacare:
This is precisely the paint-by-the-numbers medical approach that
Obamacare threatens to bring across the pond to our shores. Indeed,
former senator Tom Daschle — whom the New York Times called the most
influential adviser to the president in the health-care debate — has
long urged that America adopt NICE-style centralized medical planning.
Indeed, according to Scott Gottlieb, writing in the Wall Street
Journal, Daschle “argues that the only way to reduce spending is by
allocating medical products based on ‘cost effectiveness.’ He’s also
called for a ‘federal health board’ modeled on the Federal Reserve to
rate medical products and create central controls on access.”
Chillingly, current Obamacare plans call for the creation of many
cost/benefit/best-practices boards, the full power of which won’t be
fully known until the bureaucrats promulgate tens of thousands of pages
of regulations between now and 2013, when the law would go into effect.
Making matters more alarming, these boards would not only govern
treatment provided in any public-option health plan, but would also be
empowered to set the standards of care paid for by private insurance.
Unless the final version of Obamacare is amended explicitly to prohibit
such centralized health planning, don’t be surprised if an American
version of the Liverpool Care Pathway comes soon to a hospital or
nursing home near you.
Obamacare is intent on cutting costs. The great danger is that while
the government will never ration its own spending, never cut its own
perks, never decide that a program has outlived its usefulness, it will
readily cut the most vulnerable among us out of life itself.
Contact: Wesley
J.
Smith
Source: Secondhand Smoke
Publish
Date: October 20, 2009
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