Tag Archives: National Health Service

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NHS paying millions to hospitals to deny food and fluids to end-of-life patients

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From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Almost two thirds of NHS trusts using the Liverpool Care Pathway have received payouts totalling millions of pounds for hitting targets related to its use, research forThe Daily Telegraph shows.

The figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal the full scale of financial inducements for the first time.

They suggest that about 85 per cent of trusts have now adopted the regime, which can involve the removal of hydration and nutrition from dying patients.

More than six out of 10 of those trusts – just over half of the total – have received or are due to receive financial rewards for doing so amounting to at least £12million.

[…]At many hospitals more than 50 per cent of all patients who died had been placed on the pathway and in one case the proportion of forseeable deaths on the pathway was almost nine out of 10.

[…]The LCP was originally developed at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and the city’s Marie Curie hospice to ease suffering in dying patients, setting out principles for how they to be treated.

It involves the withdrawal of treatments or tests from patients which doctors believe could cause distress and do more harm than good.

[…]A series of cases have also come to light in which family members said they were not consulted or even informed when food and fluids were withheld from their loved-ones.

What would happen if we had government-run health care? When you make something “free”, more people want to use it, but fewer people want to provide it – because there is no money in it. So what does the government do to control costs? They ration care to people who can no longer vote to keep them in power. The weak, the elderly – just put them on a pathway to death. Is that what we want here in the United States?

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When government runs health care: NHS offers sex tips to children as young as 13

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Dina sent me this disturbing article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Teenagers as young as 13 are being given explicit sexual advice and tips on how to lose their virginity from a taxpayer-funded website and iPhone app.

The respectyourself.info website contains graphic detail about various sexual acts – including those that involve a man physically abusing his partner during sex.

On the website, which is targeted at those as young as 13, teens can take an ‘Are you ready quiz’ and answer a series of multiple-choice questions to assess whether they are prepared to lose their virginity.

[…]A variety of degrading sexual acts are listed within it, with many too graphic to reproduce.

[…]The website and app, designed to cut teenage pregnancies, have been branded ‘grossly irresponsible’ by family charities.

The project, part-funded by the EU and Warwickshire County Council and designed by the NHS, is the first of its kind in the UK.

[…]The respectyourself.info website features sex tips for children as young as 13 and naked pictures of a man and a woman with their erogenous zones highlighted. There is also a ‘sextionary’ to describe slang terms for genitalia.

One section of the website – which is free to download and has been targeted at children as young as 13 – gives tips on anal and oral sex as well as losing your virginity.

This story reminds me of a line from Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House”. He wrote: “The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. ” Sometimes I wonder whether all of this effort by the government to encourage things like sex education, no-fault divorce, recreational premarital sex, discouraging chivalry and traditional male roles, etc. is all just an effort to break up the relatively self-sufficient nuclear family unit. People who have a ton of sexual experience before marrying don’t have stable marriages nor do they have high quality marriages (see studies below). Breaking up future families is what creates the need for bigger government: more social programs, more welfare, more divorce courts, more public schools, more day care, more police, more regulation, etc. Less freedom. Less love. Less intimacy.

This sort of story is particularly disturbing for me, because I have paid a lot of money in taxes during career. I have kept myself chaste all this time so that I would be able to bond tightly to whichever woman I marry. Now I see that if I were in the UK, my tax money would be going to indoctrinate the women I could be married into a lifestyle that would make them unable to perform the roles of wife and mother – shrinking the pool of candidates that I can choose from. My earnings would be used by people who don’t agree with my goals and my values to wreck my plan for lifelong married love and a house filled with children. We shouldn’t be voting for the government to control things like health care or schools or helping the poor or anything. They just wreck it all with their own immoral agenda.

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Patients starving and dying of thirst in socialized NHS health care system

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From the UK Telegraph, a story about government-run health care in the UK.

Excerpt:

Forty-three hospital patients starved to death last year and 111 died of thirst while being treated on wards, new figures disclose today.

The death toll was disclosed by the Government amid mounting concern over the dignity of patients on NHS wards.

They will also fuel concerns about care homes, as it was disclosed that eight people starved to death and 21 people died of thirst while in care.

Last night there were warnings that they must prompt action by the NHS and care home regulators to prevent further deaths among patients.

The Office for National Statistics figures also showed that:

  • as well as 43 people who starved to death, 287 people were recorded by doctors as being malnourished when they died in hospitals;
  • there were 558 cases where doctors recorded that a patient had died in a state of severe dehydration in hospitals;
  • 78 hospital and 39 care home patients were killed by bedsores, while a further 650 people who died had their presence noted on their death certificates;
  • 21,696 were recorded as suffering from septicemia when they died, a condition which experts say is most often associated with infected wounds.

The records, from the Office for National Statistics, follow a series of scandals of care of the elderly, with doctors forced to prescribe patients with drinking water or put them on drips to make sure they do not become severely dehydrated .

This is the problem with socialized medicine. You pay your money up front and then later on the government decides how much treatment you get. They have no reason to be nice to you – you already paid them. They don’t get paid more or less based on the quality of care they give you. You can’t get a refund on taxes paid. And where else can you go? It’s a single payer system.

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