Bringing Britain's Energy Woes to America?

Bringing Britain’s woes to America?
 
Will Biden-AOC energy policies do to Americans what UK climate obsession is doing to Brits?
 
Paul Driessen
 
Virginia enacted a Clean Economy Act; other states have implemented similar laws. AOC demands a national Green New Deal; President Biden is imposing one via executive decree. The United Kingdom is determined to reach Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions; the European Union is pursuing a Green Deal.
 
All these policies send energy prices rocketing upward, eliminating jobs and killing people. Instead of reducing emissions, they simply move them overseas, where they combine with massive air and water pollution, habitat destruction and wildlife decimation – as China and other countries burn more coal, oil and gas every year, to improve their people’s living standards ... and to mine and process raw materials for the wind turbines, solar panels and battery modules they manufacture for climate-obsessed nations.
 
The net result: Progress toward global Net Zero is zero – worse than zero – and all the lost jobs, rising poverty, reduced living standards and policy-driven deaths are for nothing.
 
President Biden wants hydrocarbon-free electricity generation by 2035, and elimination of all fossil fuel extraction and use by 2050. That means no gasoline or diesel vehicles; no natural gas to power factories or heat, warm water and cook in homes, hospitals and businesses; no petrochemical feedstocks for fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals and thousands of other essential, everyday products.
 
All US energy will be provided by wind, solar and battery power – millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of battery modules, sprawling across continental United States and along its coasts. Petrochemicals will come from crops planted on millions of acres of former wildlife habitat.
 
To drive this extreme agenda, Team Biden has canceled pipelines, leases and permits; pressured banks to stop lending money for drilling; and issued scores of regulations that delay and drive up costs for fossil fuel projects – while making it easy for industrial-scale wind and solar installations to get permits. Prices for energy, transportation, food, services and used cars predictably shot up. Inflation and consumer prices reached 40-year highs.
 
Henry Hub natural gas prices doubled from $2.61 per mcf (thousand cubic feet or million BTUs) in November 2020 to $5.51 in October 2021, before falling to $4.75 in January 2022, as skyrocketing global prices spurred drilling, fracking and production on US state and private lands. Regular gasoline averaged $2.17 a gallon nationwide in 2020 – but hit $3.39/gal ($4.38 in California) in the same timeframe.
 
As Americans fret and fume over the needlessly high prices – and wonder what the future might hold – they can look to the UK and EU (a) to count their blessings for comparatively low prices today and (b) to ponder how continued climate-centric policies could impact American livelihoods and living standards.
 
Britain and continental Europe have already embraced a wind-and-solar future, closed coal and nuclear power plants, and banned fracking for the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath their feet, while North Sea production keeps falling. They have reaped the whirlwind from those callously inept policies.
 
(It is illuminating and ironic that Russian organizations finance many US, UK and EU anti-fracking disinformation campaigns, funneling funds through a Bermuda law firm, a shell company and the Sea Change Foundation to the Sierra Club, Climate Action Network and other groups.)
 
Britain and Europe’s vaunted wind turbines have been generating electricity at a dismal 14% of “nameplate capacity” – providing power three hours a day, one day a week, four days a month, in short spurts, at completely unpredictable times. Their wintertime solar power has been equally sporadic and unpredictable. No modern society can function on such energy.
 
The huge gaps have been plugged with gas- and coal-fired generation, with much of the gas coming from Russia and the USA. But Asia also wants the gas, and Russia is playing Ukraine/Nord Stream 2 pipeline politics with its gas, tightening supplies as demand soars. UK and EU home and business gas and electricity prices are in the stratosphere – five to ten times the Biden Era prices Americans are paying.
 
Luckily for families and businesses, Britain’s Office of Gas & Electric Markets (Ofgem) regulates how much utility companies can charge. But that often means keeping household, hospital, school and business energy prices well below the utilities’ actual costs – with predictable results.
 
Experts say the average annual household bill of £1,277 ($1,755) could surge to £1,865 ($2,530) when the current price cap is raised in April 2022 – for homes and apartments that are much smaller than US counterparts, in a climate with much less extreme summer and winter temperatures than in much of the United States. Annual bills could exceed £2,000 ($2,715) or much more at Ofgem’s August review.
 
National Energy Action says this could put more than 6 million UK households (nearly one-fourth of all households) in “fuel poverty” – unable to afford proper heat, and often having to choose between heating or eating, even when cold indoor temperatures put their health and lives at risk.
 
For families that want budgetary certainty, the average 12-month fixed deal for a typical household now costs almost £2,500 ($3,430). But the UK’s second-biggest energy supplier’s most recent fixed-rate offer is almost £4,200 ($5,750)! That’s because natural gas and electricity generation costs are expected to keep rising – and because utilities must pay wind turbine operators “constraint payments” to turn turbines off whenever they generate more power than the grid needs and can absorb!
 
The month-ahead natural gas price at the Dutch TTF hub (a European benchmark for trading gas) recently hit €93.3 ($107) per megawatt-hour. That’s $31 an mcf – more than six times the January 2022 Henry Hub price. Just a month earlier, the European day-ahead gas price reached $61 per mcf!
 
No wonder 30 UK energy suppliers went bankrupt by the end of 2021 – leaving families and businesses scrambling to find new suppliers, at skyrocketing prices for heating and cooking. When utilities cannot charge customers anywhere near operating costs, they go belly-up.
 
No wonder two-thirds of UK renters struggle to pay their energy bills, and 400,000 more UK households were in danger of losing their gas and electricity provider before last Christmas. People are “genuinely terrified” about rising energy costs. Excess winter energy-poverty death tolls are likely to set new records.
 
Health and living standards in Britain and Europe will likely get far worse. In addition to insane energy costs, wages and environmental regulation costs are much higher than in Asia. Ceramic, steel, aluminum, automotive and other energy-intensive companies and industries are becoming uncompetitive. Manufacturing, jobs, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are just moving to Asia.
 
Climate and energy politics, combined with fierce global demand, make it unlikely that Europe’s energy prices will go down. And while the EU recently voted to define natural gas and nuclear power as “sustainable,” acquiring affordable gas and building new nuclear plants will take years and be battled every step of the way. Rolling blackouts could become as common as in California.
 
British politicians “rail at energy costs” and argue about trimming them at the margins, says journalist Madeline Grant, perhaps by reducing the 5% VAT on energy or the 25% green-social subsidy levies on electricity bills. But they “dare not question the green policies” that cause energy price increases, end up taking no action, and then slap hefty new “pollution taxes” on gas and diesel vehicles.
 
Britain and Europe need to drill and frack their vast shale deposits. Having shut down their older nuclear plants, they must start building small modular reactors. The rest of the developed world needs to take similar actions – and not only because China, India and the rest of the developing world are not about to give up fossil fuels and rely on unreliable wind and solar power, but to save jobs and lives.
 
Otherwise, Britain’s Christmas just past will be its, Europe’s and America’s Christmas future, forever. Scrooge learned from Marley. Will Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, AOC and their lot learn from reality?
 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. 

Charles' Comment:  There seems to be no end to the destruction of lives and society that radical environmentalists and the believers in the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis work with so much dedication to accomplish!

Appendicitis in Nova Scotia and Single-Payer Medicine

A materials physicist friend of mine told me how his socialist sister lost her desire for a single-payer nationalized medical system.  She was on temporary business assignment in Nova Scotia, Canada and a neighbor began having severe pains.  She took her neighbor to the hospital and they entered the emergency room, where concern was expressed that her pain was caused by appendicitis.  The woman was screaming with pain.  She was told to wait for Triage and after a long wait, the examiner declared that yes, the pain was due to appendicitis.  My friend's sister assumed they would rush her to surgery.  But no, the doctor announced that she was not yet close enough to death to warrant surgery.

For 36 hours the woman screamed and writhed in pain.  My friend's sister stayed with her and helplessly listened to her screams for 36 hours.  Finally, the doctors decided she was close enough to death that they were willing to operate on her, and presumably to shove aside the many patients who had been waiting months for operations.  She did survive the operation, but my friend's sister's desire for a nationalized single-payer medical system did not.  She is now a furious opponent of single-payer nationalized health care systems.

Obama and many of his friends who want ObamaCare, really ObamaUncaringTax, to fail so it can be replaced with a fully nationalized single-payer system should have been with her.  Yes, I do understand that some of his friends are so callous that such an event would not have changed their minds, but no one can listen to a woman scream for 36 hours without at least being miserable.  At least, I cannot imagine that they would not be miserable.  But, that may be a failure of imagination on my part, because after all, they are Obama's friends.

The story above is anecdotal and scary.  Studies of larger populations are certainly useful in testing whether such stories are consistent with the Big Picture.  So, here is a Daily Mail report on the National Health Service in Great Britain:

Patients having major surgery in NHS hospitals face a much higher risk of dying than those in America, research has revealed.

Doctors found that people who have treatment here are four times more likely to die than US citizens undergoing similar operations.

The most seriously ill NHS patients were seven times more likely to die than their American counterparts.

Experts blame the British fatality figures on a shortage of specialists and lack of intensive care beds for post-operative recovery.

They also suggest that long waiting lists mean diseases are more advanced before they are treated.

Researchers from University College London and Columbia University, in New York, studied 1,000 surgery patients at the Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan, and compared them to nearly 1,100 people who had similar operations at the Queen Alexandra Hospital, in Portsmouth.

The results showed that just under ten per cent of British patients died in hospital afterwards compared to 2.5 per cent in America. Among the most seriously ill cases there was a seven-fold difference in the death rates.

The New York patients had paid for treatment through private medical insurance and were therefore likely to be "wealthier and healthier", whereas the NHS patients were from all social classes.

However, the study aimed to "iron out" these differences by rating each patient on their clinical status.

We Americans really must get rid of ObamaCare before it collapses and we get the almost inevitable rush by the Democrats to replace it with a fully nationalized single-payer system similar to that of Great Britain or Canada.

Obama Chooses NHS Admirer to Head Medicare

Obama has chosen Dr. Donald Berwick to be the new head of the Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services.  Berwick gave the talk shown in the video below in 2008 in the United Kingdom and bowed in praise to the altruists' shrine of the British National Health Service (NHS).  He loves the political system of rationing health care and redistributing the costs from those not poor and not unhealthy to the poor and the unhealthy.  He claimed that health care decisions made in the free market are made in the dark, while those made in the bowels of a gigantic government are made democratically in the public light.  That huge government makes democratic decisions in the light of day is certainly laughable in the light of understanding how ObamaCare came to be.  The backroom deals with big companies to gain their support or at least to prevent their opposition, the backroom deals to enlist the aid and enthusiasm of labor unions, the backroom deals to get the votes of certain reluctant Senators, the willful trampling of the well-expressed opposition of the People, and the order to pass the bill so we would find out what was in it, all make a lie of the Berwick idea that the political process is democratic and performed in open daylight.

On the other hand, health care decisions made in a free market are made where they matter in the light of day.  First, the government does meddle extensively with the free market in medicine, with many limitations on health insurance due to state mandates and many government limitations on competition between hospitals and among doctors, such as severe limits on their numbers.  The government has also stacked the cards in favor of having employers choose the health care insurance options for their employees, thereby reducing the employee's choice in the matter.  Still, the employee does evaluate his own compensation package in choosing employers and the employer will sometimes offer multiple choices.  The market, if it were free, would offer more choices.  But, even after all this, the decision that really counts is one made by the individual, who can decide which compensation plan best meets his individual needs.  In the Berwick and Obama system, bureaucrats will make many more of these decisions than they now make.  Dr. Berwick thinks this is great.  Listen to him:

This is our future under ObamaCare

Dr. Smith, a young urologist in Great Britain was misdiagnosed three times for breast cancer by National Health Service General Practitioners and examined once by a Cancer Center in Oxford and told she had a benign cyst. Soon after, it was discovered the pea sized cyst was the size of a golf ball and the cancer had spread into her liver and spine.  Chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and hormone therapy have failed and she has 18 months to live.  She was months from her wedding.

Her condition is now stable and doctors believe she could potentially live for ten to 20 years with the tumours in her spine if they could operate to remove her liver cancer. It must be shrunk first, but normal chemotherapy has failed to do this.

Dr Smith has been told she needs Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT), a new treatment in which millions of tiny radioactive beads are injected into the artery which supplies the cancer, to deliver targeted radiation.

The treatment was approved in Europe in 2002 and has been used to treat 15,000 patients worldwide, including up to 300 in Britain. But Dr Smith's primary care trust in Ryde has refused to fund it because it has not been fully approved by the rationing body, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE).

The treatment costs 23,000 pounds and her regional zone in the NHS will not allow it, though other regional zones do.  Each zone has to ration the care provided to stay within their expenditure allotment.  Without the treatment, the NICE and her regional zone of the NHS have condemned her to death.  But, nice people do not talk about death panels.

Given the shortage of doctors in America, perhaps a hospital here should make her an offer.  They could offer to pay for her medical care in exchange for her agreeing to practice with them for a period of time during which she would pay the practice back.  I doubt the monolithic NHS in Great Britain has the flexibility to do the same, however much sense it would make.

IMF Projects Some Out-of-This-World National Debts

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has produced the debt predictions for the year 2014 given below.  The chart is from the 27 March - 2 April 2010 issue of The Economist.  The bar graph plot is actually of the increase in the national debt from 2007 to the projected debt of 2014, which is given in the small boxes on the right as a percent of the nations GDPs.

The United States IMF-projected increase in the national debt from 2007, when the Democrats were in their first year of controlling Congress, looks to be about 47% between then and 2014.  Both Japan and Great Britain will have added even more to their national debts, but note that the U.S. has recently been much more profligate in its overspending than even such stalwart socialist countries as France, Germany, and Italy.  While Japan's projected 2014 national debt will guarantee its sluggish growth for decades as it struggles under an unimaginable debt 246% greater than its GDP, the projected national debt of the U.S. at 108% of GDP will make us stagger a good deal also.  We will wind up with a national debt worse than that of Britain, France, and Germany, each of which we recognize as irresponsible socialist countries.  What does this make the U.S.?

Kudos belong to Canada, which has been much wiser in managing its economy throughout this recession.  It is increasing its national debt by only about 5% from 2007 to 2014 and its 2014 national debt will be a mere 69% of its GDP.  That should position Canada for solid growth in the near future and leave Canadians much less burdened with debt and the interest on that debt than the wayward Americans to the south.  It looks as though I would be wise to shift some of my retirement investment to Canada, where it may be safer and have better prospects for growth.

Britain's Met Office Predicted a Mild Winter Ever -- For the Third Time In a Row

Christopher Booker reports in the Telegraph that "the serial inaccuracy" of the Met Office climate forecasts in Great Britain is no longer just a joke, but a national scandal.  He goes on to say:

The reason the Met Office so persistently gets its seasonal forecasts wrong is that it has been hi-jacked from the role for which we pay it nearly £200 million a year, to become one of the world's major propaganda engines for the belief in man-made global warming. Over the past three years, it has become a laughing stock for forecasts which are invariably wrong in the same direction.

The year 2007, it predicted, would be "the warmest ever" – just before global tempratures plunged by more than the entire net warming of the 20th century, Three years running it predicted warmer than average winters – as large parts of the northern hemisphere endured record cold and snowfalls. Last year's "barbecue summer" was the third time running that predictions of a summer drier and warmer than average prefaced weeks of rain and cold. Last week the Met Office was again predicting that 2010 will be the "warmest year" on record, while Europe and the US look to be facing further weeks of intense cold.

What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. (Its website now proclaims it to be "the Met Office for Weather and Climate Change".) Its then-director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records. In line with IPCC theory, its computers were programmed to predict that, as CO2 levels rose, temperatures would inevitably follow. From 1990 to 2007, the Department of the Environment gave the Met Office no less than £146 million for its "climate predictions programme".

But in the past three years, with the Met Office chaired by Robert Napier, a former global warming activist and previously head of WWF UK, its pretensions have been exposed as never before. The "Climategate" leak of documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU/Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data, past and present, to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong.

It will be equally instructive to take note of the weather of the last several years in the U.S. and worldwide. The climate models so highly touted by the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 and the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists have not been predicting the climate of the period since 2001 well at all. The outcome of the predictions is always warmer than the actuality, even when the actual raw temperature measurements have been manipulated to make them look warmer than they really are. If the climate models are not good for any particular year and not good for any particular decade, then why should we have much confidence in them for 50 to 100 year predictions? It seems clear we would be foolish to expect much of them in light of the fact that there are clearly climate factors which the models do not have a grasp on. The climate prediction models of the Met, Hadley Centre, and the CRU of the University of East Anglia are clearly clueless. I would suggest this is because they are biased to predict an excessive effect due to CO2 emissions and because they do not yet understand the natural forces on the climate.

The French, Socialism, and Suicide

In the past, I have written that depression and excessive drunkenness tend to be common in despotic and specifically communist and highly socialist societies.  I wrote about the increase in drinking and health problems in socialist Great Britain.  There I also referred to the heavy drinking in Russia.  I believe heavy drinking, depression, drug use, and suicide tend to increase when people feel little empowered to control their own lives.  Since socialism is the shift of self-control to government control, there is likely to be a tendency for depression, drinking, drug use, and suicide to increase as a nation becomes more socialist.  This tendency is particularly strong for men, who seem to have a greater need for self-control than do women.  This is evidenced in the higher percentage of men who are Republican compared to women in the United States.  The social conservatives are more evenly split between men and women, but the fiscal and defense Republicans are more predominantly men.

The French are coddled.  They are provided health care, long holidays, protected jobs, free college educations, and welfare galore.  There are problems, however:

• There are few permanent jobs for the young, since job-protection rules keep employers from hiring and young people are only brought onto projects as contract workers.
• Permanent workers cannot be let go, so they are often given meaningless work, sometimes in the hopes that they will leave the company.
• Competitive pressures are increasing , due to foreign competition and the privatization of some French government operations.
• Only 32% of French employers have confidence in their workers, while German employers have a 47% confidence level and Americans a 54% confidence level.

Perhaps this kind of society is just too eviscerating for men.  Perhaps they need a challenge and they even need the insecurities of life that make the personal achievement of security rewarding and makes life more interesting.  Boredom is more depressing than challenge any day.

According to an Editorial in the Economist of 10 - 16 October, the French suicide rate is 14.6 per 100,000 people, with men having a rate of 22.8 vs. a rate of 7.5 for women.  Only the suicide rates of Finland and Belgium exceed those of France in Western Europe.  In Eastern Europe, the Russians had a suicide rate of 32.2 per 100,000 people in 2005.  The suicide rates in Lithuania and Ukraine are also very high.  The French suicide rate is twice that of Great Britian and 40% higher than in Germany and the U.S.

Two out of five French people have a case of serious depression at some period in their lives.  The French use more anti-depressant pills than the British or the Germans, with public health insurance paying for anti-depressant drugs for one in ten of the French people.

This is the direction Obama is taking the United States in.  We can anticipate higher rates of depression and more suicides, especially among men.  We can also anticipate smaller cars and increased rates of highway deaths and injuries due to his demands for ever lighter cars to meet higher and higher gas mileage requirements.  He will also lead us to rationed health care and the added deaths that come with fewer future medical innovations and less aggressive treatments due to health care rationing.  We need to keep track of the death toll in each of these categories as we travel the deadly road to ever more intrusive socialism.

Let's Find a Reason Not to Repair this Man's Broken Arm!

The NHS of Britain has four times canceled operations to repair a plumber's fractured arm which occurred 10 months ago.  Look at this horribly disfigured and useless arm in the picture accompanying the British newspaper account.  I shuddered.

This man has 3 children, cannot work, has been denied unemployment insurance, is about to lose his home, and he cannot get the NHS to operate on his arm.  They say they will not operate because he is a smoker and has high blood pressure.  Well, it sounds as though he is willing to take the chance of complications due to his high blood pressure.  Apparently being homeless on the streets and alive is less acceptable to him as a way of life than the risk of an operation.  But the NHS has to look for reasons to ration care to save money, so the fact that he is a smoker makes him of less value to society.  The fact that he has high blood pressure means there is some chance the cost of the operation will not bear the fruit of a happy outcome.  So, this plumber has no choice in how he will live out his life in Britain.  It is all up to the whims of the state.

We can follow a path which will lead to the same outcome by passing ObamaCare.  After a few years, we will also be powerless to make our own choices with respect to the quality of our lives too.  When we cede our responsibility for our own health care, we also cede our right to life.

Daughter Saves Mother from Euthanasia in the Clutches of Britain's NHS

In another heart-rending story of the horrors of government-run health care systems, a daughter had to work diligently to force Britain's National Health Service (NHS) to end their effort to dehydrate and starve her mother to death.  This is the same road ObamaCare is planned to take the U.S. down, so pay attention to the British who are further down the road and well into the consequences of their past health care choices.

Hazel Fenton was admitted to a hospital with pneumonia.  Her daughter Christine Ball had been taking care of her and knew her to be ill, but did not think she was dying.  Then a young doctor told her that her mother was going to be put on the Liverpool care pathway plan to ease her last few days.   A nurse asked Ball what she wanted done with her mother's body.  Ball said her mother was not dying, but she was ignored.  Fenton's antibiotics were cut off.  She was put on painkilling drugs and nutrients were cut off.  Then, on Fenton's 80th birthday, she was feeling better and talking with her family.  Ball worked hard to get her mother nutrients again, but she was ignored for another four days before her mother was put on artificial feeding.  Now, 9 months later, her mother lives in a nursing home near Ball's home.

Ball, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, says:

My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death.  It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS.

Deborah Murphy, the national lead nurse for the Liverpool care pathway plan says that 3% of the patients put on the plan recover.  Yes, I suppose if you put an elderly person who is in compromised health on heavy painkillers, deprive them of antibiotics if they need them, and cut off nutrients, you can quite successfully kill off 97% of them.  One has to wonder how many more of the elderly would survive if you did not actually try to kill them.

There is a pattern showing up here.  The NHS in Britain is trying very hard to get rid of those elderly patients who cost it money now and may cost it more in the not too distant future.  The family members of those elderly patients who are saved from the government-run health care system in Britain have to be very determined fighters!

Since Obama and his fanatic followers are determined to go down this same socialized medicine road, it makes a father and mother wonder how hard their children will fight for them.  Heaven forbid you are elderly and you have no children at all to fight for you.

Come to think of it, so many Objectivists never had children, that this may be a plan to preferentially kill off Objectivists!  After all, the socialists have never had as effective an enemy as the few, but determined, Objectivists.  We are like the Continental Army during the American Revolution, while those who have at least read Ayn Rand are the better state militia troops who may reload their weapons at least once before fleeing, and the remaining conservatives are the militia you hope have the strength of conviction to at least fire their muskets and rifles once before fleeing the despot's highly trained legions.

Replicating Britsh Health Care Cost Controls

With the Baucus "conceptual plan" for government control of the health care insurance in the U.S. passing the Finance Committee of the Senate, so it can be meshed with the other 4 draconian health plans in the Congress, we are heading in the direction of ever-increasingly expensive health care.  This will put greater burdens on the taxpayer, who will finally demand the kind of government cost controls being used in the more mature government-run health system in Great Britain.

As I have noted before, it is those whose health is deteriorating in their final few years of life who cost the most to a government-run health care system, so the only effective way to save money is to ration their care.  The British have found they can save a lot of money by putting the ill elderly in a hospice on painkilling drugs and by denying them food and water.  They die soon and stop costing money to treat.  It is very effective way for a socialized medical system to control costs.

Here is the story of a man who had stomach cancer and whose treatment stopped it.  Later, he became ill and the British doctors said his cancer had come back, though they did not do tests to prove this.  Tests cost money.  He was put in a hospice, and ignoring his family, they put him on painkiller drugs and denied him food and water.  He died in two weeks.  The post-death autopsy revealed that he died of pneumonia.  He did not have cancer.  The pneumonia was very curable.  His wife had insisted they check him for pneumonia before they put him in the hospice, but they would not do it.  It was apparently too expensive to check him for pneumonia.

Darwall - Government Medicine vs. the Elderly

Rupert Darwall, a London-based strategist currently writing a book on the history of global warming, wrote an interesting Opinion in the Wall Street Journal on 14 September 2009. He noted that the Patients Association, an independent charity, had examined many end-of-life care cases of the British National Health Service (NHS) and had found "a consistent pattern of shocking standards of care." It gave examples across the NHS of "appalling treatment."

Darwall notes that the usual justification for socialized medicine is to provide access to care for the poor and disadvantaged. But this is best done by a benefits system and refundable tax credits. In reality, it is assumed that health care resources are fixed and it is necessary to prioritize their use for those who can benefit the most from them. So, Britain's NHS is the "national triage service." He notes:

It should come as no surprise that the NHS is institutionally ageist. The elderly have fewer years left to them; why then should they get health-care resources that would benefit a younger person more? An analysis by a senior U.K.-based health-care expert earlier this decade found that in the U.S. health-care spending per capita goes up steeply for the elderly, while the U.K. didn't show the same pattern. The U.K.'s pattern of health-care spending by age had more in common with the former Soviet bloc.

He notes that this assumption of limited resources lies behind Obama's claim that "We spend one-and-a-half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren't any healthier for it." Obama claims this threatens our economic competitiveness.

In my opinion, we would not be so tempted to view it from that angle at all except that we only offer tax breaks to companies for the purchase of employee health insurance. If we separated this cost from companies, then it would not affect their competitiveness and it would solve the problem of people losing their insurance when they lose a job or switch jobs. If the tax break for the purchase of health insurance went only to individuals, as it should, then their spending on health insurance would be viewed just like that on any other consumer spending, except that they would get a tax deduction for it. If Americans wanted to spend 1.5 times what other nations do and if they want to spend more specifically to keep granny alive another year or two or five, that would be viewed as entirely their prerogative.

Darwall questions what makes it bad to spend so much on health care? He does say that distortions such as malpractice suits and the absence of consumer price consciousness should be addressed. Putting insurance in the hands of the individual, rather than his company, and allowing high deductible plans with Health Savings Accounts is an effective answer to the issue of consumer price consciousness. Darwall observes that our greater spending on health care "incentivizes new drugs, new therapies and better ways of delivering health care. Government-administered systems are so slow and clumsy that they turn the lump of health-care fallacy into reality."

A 2002 Wanless report, which Blair's government used to justify a large tax increase to fund more NHS spending, found the NHS to be late to adopt and slow to diffuse new technology. The NHS more than doubled its spending from 1999-2000 to 2009-2010, an increase of more than 7% a year [according to Darwall, but I calculate that to be more than 10% a year], and still remains medically backward. This Wanless report examined five country's health care systems and found that only the U.S. was both an early adopter and rapid diffuser of new medical techniques. The U.S. is the world's "principal engine driving medical advance."

Indeed, which nation's scientists and doctors win almost all of the Nobel Prizes in Medicine? Those working in the U.S., of course. And it does not end with the fundamental scientific advances either, as the Wanless report confirms. Yet, Obama wants us to have the backward equivalent of the British NHS simply because he objects to the way we spend so much on granny to give her a year or two or five more years of life!

No wonder he is so sensitive on the death panel issue. It is because this really is one of the main issues, as recognized earlier by the professional publications of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an adviser to Obama on health care issues and brother of Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel. The recent cover story in Newsweek also trod this path. As I have noted before, this path is inevitable once health care becomes a government service, rather than a personal consumer choice. This is so no many how many lies are told by socialist politicians to deceive the People, even if some of those politicians believe the lies.

Socialist UK Drinking Deaths Increase

I have observed that one of the symptoms of the misery of people in socialist countries is their heavy drinking. In a broader historical view, one could observe that mind numbing drug use has a tendency to scale with the misery of the people under despotic regimes. In this way, one includes the use of opium and heroin in many of the countries of Asia with tyrannical governments and the more recent history of the extremely heavy drinking in the Soviet Union and even now in Russia. Eastern Europe also turned more to drink when it was isolated behind the Iron Curtain. When Sweden reached its deepest socialist stagnation, drinking had become very bad there. When Ireland was exploited by the British, Ireland became a land of drunks. Japan is known for its male drunkenness, perhaps induced by the strange tyranny of the Japanese corporate culture and its group decision-making process.

Between 1991 and 2006, alcohol-induced deaths in the United Kingdom more than doubled to 8,758. In that year, alcohol-induced deaths in the United States were 22,073. On a per capita basis, there were about 1.96 times as many deaths in the more socialist United Kingdom. In 1995/1996, 34,660 National Health Service hospital admissions with a primary diagnosis relating to alcohol occurred. In 2005/2006, this number had increased to 52,270, with men producing 70% of these admissions.

Women vote in larger percentages for the security they think that socialism provides. Men are more likely to feel socialism not as security, but as a loss of choice and opportunity. Men are more likely to see themselves as marginalized under socialism and to feel its chains. Men are more likely to become depressed and drown their sorrows in alcohol and drugs. As Great Britain has steadily become more socialist since 1991, the British have turned more and more to drink.

Do we wish to follow the socialist nations of Europe deeper into socialism and hence deeper into depression, especially for men? Are we not also likely to turn more to mind-numbing drugs and drink to suppress our depression if we do so? Shouldn't women think about this consequence for the men of their society before they vote for socialism?

Government Health Care Death Panels

Obama and the Democrats are fond of saying there are no death panels in their health insurance reform bills now in Congress. Of course, there is no entity called "Death Panel" in those bills. Neither is there a panel whose stated purpose is to kill patients or to assist patients in suicide. But, the government does intend to dictate the kind of care to be paid for by acceptable insurance plans with a mind to reduce costs. With an aging population, they are specifically complaining that the costs of patients in their last year of life is especially high and the expense of such people is going to continue to drive medical costs upward. The two stated reasons for passing their bills are to bring down costs and to insure the few Americans who are not insured, though they love to greatly inflate that number.

The United Kingdom has had a National Health Service since 1948. They also have a desire to contain costs. In 2004, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the government's health overlook agency adopted the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) as the protocol to reduce patient suffering in their final hours. This was developed by Marie Curie, the cancer charity, but is now used for patients who have lost consciousness or are having difficulty swallowing medication. Patients are denied sustaining fluids and put under deep sedation using automated sedation syringe drivers, if a panel of the doctors treating them, including a senior doctor, recommends this. The procedure is used in more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices, 560 care homes, and in 800 other instances, such as in patient's homes. In 2007-2008, 16.5% of deaths in Britain followed continuous deep sedation, which is twice the percentage in the Netherlands and Belgium.

According to a letter signed by Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London; Dr. Peter Hargreaves, Palliative Medicine Consultant at St. Luke's Cancer Centre in Guildford; Dr. Anthony Cole, Chairman of the Medical Ethics Alliance; Dr. David Hill, anaesthetist; Dowager Lady Salisbury, Chairman of the Choose Life Campaign; and Dr. Elizabeth Negus, Lecturer in English at Barking University, some patients have been wrongly put on the Liverpool Care Pathway. Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated can become confused, especially when on pain-killing drugs, and be wrongly put on the LCP. They are concerned that tick box medicine is replacing real thinking for those following this procedure. Many doctors are not checking patients often enough for progress and the sedation makes it more difficult to see if any progress is occurring. Dr. Hargreaves says he has taken patients off the LCP and seen them live for significant time after wards.

So, Death Panels do exist in the U.K.'s National Health Service. For the same reasons that they exist in Britain, they will also come to exist in the U.S. under a government-run health care system. Under such a system, they are inevitable, no matter how much politicians may wish to deny them now.

Of course, end of life decisions do have to be made. In a private health care system, they are made by the patient, the family, and the doctors treating the patient. But, after the government takes over the delivery of health care, as with all government activities, a bureaucracy takes over. One of the primary purposes of all the Democrat bills is to set up a huge structure of such agencies and advisory panels to grow into the controlling bodies for the takeover of all medical care in the United States. They have set up panels and groups to recommend effective treatments. They will deal with end of life issues and set up procedures similar to the LCP in Britain. In time, they will minimize the consultation with patient wishes and patient's families, as all government bureaucracies do. They will deal with patients and families as though one size fits all. This is the nature of the beast.

We will definitely find that we will also develop Death Panels if we go down this road. It is inevitable! And when these bureaucracies decide whether your mother will live or die, she will surely be thought to be of much less value than you think she is. This is also inevitable.

Alternative Energy Failing in Great Britain

The last time Britain had widespread blackouts was in the early 1970s, when they were caused by coal miner's on strike. Once again, the socialists are bringing blackouts to Britain. An EU directive to cut what they call pollution, but what is mostly CO2, is forcing the closure of 9 oil and coal-fired power plants by 2015. Four existing nuclear power stations are also being shut down, due to obsolescence. In the next 10 years, Britain needs to replace one-third of its electric generating capacity.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party, Britain's socialist party, has started a Low Carbon Transition Plan in July, well after the scientific understanding of such nonsense should have put a stop to such plans. The plan expects 40% of Britain's electricity will come from low carbon sources such as clean coal, nuclear, and renewable sources. The plan assumes no increase in the demand for electricity out to 2020! It also assumes a large increase in wind farm generation capacity, which is probably very unrealistic. Meanwhile, the government was held in a state of stasis for a long time on approving a new nuclear reactor design, thanks to environmentalist interference, so new nuclear power plants could not be built. The Labour government has finally approved a nuclear power plant design, but no power companies have yet applied for a permit to build. With minimal obstruction, a plant could be built by 2018. Environmentalist obstructions will delay plant completion dates well beyond that for sure.

The plan assumes that renewable energy sources will provide 30% of the power by 2020, while 10% will come from carbon capture and storage energy sources, even though such sources do not now exist. Nuclear will generate only about 8% of Britain's power.

Hidden in the appendix of a report on that plan there is a projection that Britain will be underserved with electricity by 3000 megawatts per year in 2017 and by 7000 megawatts per year in 2025. These shortages will, in fact, be much greater without a change of policy. Britain is in for some serious blackout time because renewable energy sources cannot provide the necessary electricity even with no increase in demand, so the actual increase in electricity capacity which will be required, will leave Britain in the dark.

Meanwhile, California and Maryland are both also expecting power shortages due to their green energy and environmentalist policies. The anti-energy socialists and environmentalists are wrecking havoc throughout the developed world.