One thing that’s discussed under Obama Care are how to handle older people who need tremendous amounts of healthcare to keep their quality of life up.
Right now its up to your current insurance system and what you can afford. With socialist systems the Government has to weight patient’s needs and overall cost and ration care to those who “Need” it.
This of course means telling an older person that they will not get treatment they need to survive. The Right has called this rationing of care “Death Panels”, the Left has called them “End of Life Counseling”, nobody is denying that people will be told that they can be saved with treatment, but its not worth it to the state for them to continue living.
of course “End of Life Counseling” seems to imply that the patient and their family will be at least involved in the process.
Elderly patients are being condemned to an early death by hospitals making secret use of “do not resuscitate” orders, an investigation has found.
The orders – which record an advance decision that a patient’s life should not be saved if their heart stops – are routinely being applied without the knowledge of the patient or their relatives.
On one ward, one-third of DNR orders were issued without consultation with the patient or their family, according to the NHS’s own records. At another hospital, junior doctors freely admitted that the forms were filled out by medical teams without the involvement of patients or relatives.
Remember this whenever you see President Obama, and remember that Mitt Romney was the one that wrote this law.
Isn’t Canada touted as a model of publicly funded healthcare?
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1071790–elderly-woman-breaks-hip-at-niagara-hospital-told-by-staff-to-call-ambulance?bn=1
Hmm….
Is it just me, or is there potentially a whole lot of State-approved “Gun Death?” on the horizon?
RE: Wallphone’s story…can’t let grannie lying in the lobby upset your response time metric or minimal staffing or whatever contributed to this silliness. If Obamacare is not killed, we can expect much of the same where a bureaucrat in D.C. decides that a hospital admission does not start until the ambulance siren turns off or something like that.
What is more scary is, that with our shifting demographics and a greater pecentage of elderly persons in the near future coupled with economic issues, I expect there to be callous calls for euthanasia (cloaked in the personal dignity arguments). What crap.
I don’t want a society modeled after “Logan’s Run” or “Soylent Green” just so we can keep Medicare solvent (which really should not exist at all, but that’s another post).
Pingback: On Death Panels | the rest of me