Tag Archives: Doctor

News

Government-run health care: starving sick babies and children to death

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Here’s a scary story from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Dan Mitchell)

Excerpt:

Now sick babies go on death pathway: Doctor’s haunting testimony reveals how children are put on end-of-life plan

  • Practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube being used on young patients
  • Doctor admits starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in neonatal unit
  • Liverpool Care Pathway subject of independent inquiry ordered by ministers
  • Investigation, including child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions

Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’.

Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults.

But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a  baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’.

The LCP – on which 130,000 elderly and terminally-ill adult patients die each year – is now the subject of an independent inquiry ordered by ministers.

The investigation, which will include child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions.

Read the whole thing, but here’s a snip:

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children.

She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.

‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.’

This is what Democrats believe about health care. When the government runs health care, health stops being about curing sickness and starts being about buying votes. Suddenly, free abortions, breast enlargements, in vitro fertilization, drugs to calm down fatherless children, contraception, HIV/AIDS all become priorities. There are some people out there who want government to pay for the health effects of their own immoral / reckless choices, and that’s what government-run health care is really about. Enabling certain lifestyles that require health care subsidies so those people can live “as good as” traditional morality lifestyles. It’s interesting to note that in countries that have government-run health care, like Canada, doctors and nurses are regularly forced to act against their consciences to murder rather than cure. It’s no surprise because socialists in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany have essentially the same view of conscience as modern leftists like the Democrat Party.

There isn’t enough money for us to pay people to voluntarily incur health care costs (and other social costs) with their immoral / irresponsible choices. But that’s exactly what happens when you make everything “health care” and then make it “free” in order to buy votes from people like Sandra Fluke. What Democrats do is look for groups that need subsidies or validation and they offer it to them with taxpayer money and laws prohibiting dissent. They essentially take the complete anti-freedom point of view on every question. They hate liberty, and love power. The want to control others and to be adored by those who depend on their benevolent redistribution of other people’s money.

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News

Public health care working as designed in the UK and Canada

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The UK Daily Mail gives us a bird’s eye view of the largest government-run health care delivery system in the world.

Excerpt:

A mother has described how her baby was left to die ‘like an abandoned animal’ after hospital doctors repeatedly ignored her desperate pleas for help.

Paula Stevenson begged doctors to act as her one-year-old daughter Hayley struggled to breathe in the days after a major heart operation.

She was so desperate she even tried ‘bribing’ a nurse with a £100 shopping voucher to give Hayley the attention she needed. Instead, hospital staff ‘humiliated and belittled’ her – treating her like a ‘nuisance’ for speaking up, she said.

Tragically, Mrs Stevenson’s maternal instinct was proven right when Hayley died of heart failure after both her lungs collapsed under the hospital’s watch.

Yesterday, as an inquest into her death concluded, a coroner said there had been ‘serious failings’ in Hayley’s care. Birmingham Children’s Hospital admitted full liability for her ‘avoidable’ death.

[…]Doctors failed to update her medical charts, were slow to look at X-rays and failed to refer Hayley to intensive care when her condition worsened.

People only care about giving you good service if they have to compete for your business in a free market, where suppliers have to offer higher quality at a lower price. Maybe that’s why the American for-profit system delivers so much better care than anywhere else in the world, and why the socialized medicine system in the UK is a miserable failure at everything except killing patients dead. The customer is never right in a government-run system. You are forced to pay into it first, and then they decide later what treatment you can have – after they’ve already been paid.

Well, maybe that’s just a problem in the UK. Canada has a single-payer government run health care system. Maybe it works better than the UK government-run system? The Montreal Gazette reports on health care in Quebec – la belle province – Canada’s most secularized and socialist province.

Excerpt:

Surgery wait times for deadly ovarian, cervical and breast cancers in Quebec are three times longer than government benchmarks, leading some desperate patients to shop around for an operating room.

But that’s a waste of time, doctors say, since the problem is spread across Quebec hospitals. And doctors are refusing to accept new patients quickly because they can’t treat them, health advocates say.

[…]The latest figures from the provincial government show that over a span of nearly 11 months, 7,780 patients in the Montreal area waited six months or longer for day surgeries, while another 2,957 waited for six months or longer for operations that required hospitalization.

The worst cases are gynecological cancers, experts say, because usually such a cancer has already spread by the time it is detected. Instead of four weeks from diagnosis to surgery, patients are waiting as long as three months to have cancerous growths removed.

But maybe the government-run health care systems cost less than the private systems? After all, governments can be more efficient than the private sector, because they have a monopoly and that’s more efficient, right? The Vancouver Sun reports on what single-payer health care costs in Canada.

Excerpt:

The true cost of Canada’s health care system is more than $11,000 in taxes each year for an average family, according to Vancouver-based think tank The Fraser Institute.

[…]Institute senior fellow Nadeem Esmail said in a news release sent out this morning: “There’s a widespread belief that health care is free in Canada. It’s not; our tax dollars cover the cost of it. But the way we pay for health care disguises exactly how much public health care insurance costs Canadian families and how that cost is increasing over time.”

The release noted that since 2002, the cost of health care insurance for the average Canadian family increased by 59.8 per cent before inflation.

“By way of comparison, the cost of public health care increased more than twice as fast as the cost of shelter, roughly four times as fast as the cost of food, and more than five times as fast as the cost of clothing,” the release said.

This is the system that Obamacare is trying to force onto us by eliminating private sector health care. We voted for a system that takes the consumer out of the health care business. Now government will call the shots, just like in the UK and in Canada.

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Commentary

Sally Pipes: how Obamacare causes doctors to quit practicing medicine

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Sally C. Pipes is one of my favorite health care policy analysts. She has written several books on topics like the Canadian health care system, the American health care system, and the Obamacare health care law. She has debated health care with that damnable leftist Paul Krugman, among others. She heads up a think tank based in San Francisco, CA called the Pacific Research Institute.

Here is her latest column in the Orange County Register.

Excerpt:

Thanks to Obamacare, America’s corps of doctors appears to have a case of the blues.

The Physicians Foundation recently asked more than 13,000 doctors about their morale, their career plans, their practices and their views of the Affordable Care Act. The results were grim.

Nearly six in 10 doctors said that they are less positive about the future of health care in America under Obamacare. Almost two-thirds have a negative attitude toward their jobs – nearly twice as many as before the health law was passed in 2010.

As a result, many doctors are cutting back on their workload or shuttering their practices. Worse, their collective frustration is exacerbating our nation’s troubling doctor shortage.

More than three-fifths of doctors say they would retire today if they could, compared with 45 percent before Obamacare. Eighty-four percent say the medical profession is in decline. Fewer doctors say they would enter the profession today if they had it to do over again, and fewer would recommend it to their children.

This decline in doctors’ morale is taking a toll on Americans’ ability to access care. Physicians report working almost 6 percent fewer hours than they did four years ago. That’s about two and a half hours less per week per doctor. Add up all the hours, and it’s the equivalent of losing more than 44,000 full-time physicians.

Doctors also report seeing some 16 percent fewer patients than they did in 2008. That represents tens of millions fewer doctor-patient encounters each year.

More than half those surveyed say they plan to cut back further on the time they devote to patient care, to work part time, to retire or to switch to direct-pay “concierge”-type medical practices, which are beyond the reach of many of Obamacare’s rules and regulations.

Even before the law, America faced a chronic doctor shortage, with a gap of 14,000 physicians in 2010. And the problem will only grow worse.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, Obamacare will push the doctor shortage up to 63,000 by 2015 – and more than 91,000 by 2020. That’s in addition to the full-time-equivalent losses from doctors working fewer hours.

I have been talking to people in my office who voted for Obama all week to see why they did what they did. Surprisingly, not many people I talked to voted for him. But for those that did, a popular reason is that they wanted to tax the rich more. I asked them what would happen if you taxed the rich more. They told me that Obama can tax people who are “rich” more and more and that the “rich” will just keep paying those higher taxes while still continuing to work and work to provide the goods and services that we all use. I asked them about regulations, and they said that Obama can just keep heaping burdensome regulations on these “rich” people more and more, and they won’t mind at all. They’ll just keep working and hiring people and providing goods and services even if they make less money and have to work more to comply with regulations.

One of the Indian contractors who voted for Obama told me that rich people do what they do because they like it, and they will keep doing it no matter how much we tax and regulate them. “They will do it for love of fairness, and because Obama is such a good man – they will be inspired by him to pay the higher taxes and to fill in the extra paperwork”, he told me. For him, people just do whatever they like. The reason why some people work is because they like working, and the reason why some people don’t work is because they like not working. Another Obama-voter told me that people should be able to do whatever they like and everyone should end up equal in the end. Some people will work because they like to, and others won’t. Taxes don’t affect what a person does. Nor does the difficulty of the work. Nor does the exposure to malpractice lawsuits.  Nor does the higher medical insurance premiums. Doctors do what they do because they like it, and the conditions and profit margins don’t matter. Rich people like doctors will keep working at whatever they do even if they are taxed so much that they earn the same amount of money as people who work at McDonald’s.

That’s the worldview of the people who voted for Obama. They don’t understand incentives at all. They don’t understand the profit motive. They think that people who go to medical school until they are 35, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in debt in the process, will be happy to work 80 hour weeks and to pay 50% of their income in taxes so that other people can have free contraceptives. That is the worldview of the left – they have no idea what the consequences are of raising taxes on “the rich”. They don’t think that there are any consequences.

If you would like to see Sally Pipes talk a bit more about Obamacare, you can watch her explain it here:

Eight minutes long.