Should We Allow Granny to Die?

Stories are now widespread in the newspapers in Great Britain about people, usually elderly, being put on the Liverpool Care Pathway.  The plan is intended for people very close to death, or at least it was originally claimed that that was its purpose.  More and more stories are emerging about people who are not so close to death being put on this euthanasia plan.  Here is another such story.

At around 4am on Monday, a friend of mine was woken by a call from the private care home in south-west London where her 98-year-old grandmother is resident.
"Mrs ------- has breathing difficulties," the night manager told her. "She needs oxygen. Shall we call an ambulance?"
"What do you mean?" my friend responded. "What's the matter with her?"
"She needs to go to hospital. Do you want that? Or would you prefer that we make her comfortable?"
Then, the chilling implication of the phone call filtered through – she was being asked whether her grandmother should be allowed to die.
"Call an ambulance now," my friend demanded.
The person at the other end persisted. "Are you sure that's what you want? For her to go to hospital."
"Yes, absolutely. Get her to hospital."
Three hours later, her grandmother was sitting up in A&E, smiling. She had a mild chest infection, was extremely dehydrated, but was responding to oxygen treatment.

Her granddaughter was wondering how her grandmother, whose major health problem is a badly calcified knee, had been allowed to become dehydrated in the first place.  Dehydration is one of the steps in the Liverpool Care Pathway when the NHS decides that an elderly patient will be allowed to die.  Now the granddaughter is worried about the care her grandmother is getting in the private care home.

As costs rise in a nationalized health care system, the average taxpayer inevitably does not have the same incentive the loving family members have for the preservation of grandma's and grandpa's lives.  Naturally, they are going to refuse the higher taxes to support the health care system and that system will have to respond with bureaucrats creating rules that will ration health care.  Generally, the value of your grandmother to society is weighed against her value, not to you, but to society.  When that happens, your rather expensive grandmother is going to receive less care than a younger person and less care than you want for her.  There is every incentive to put your grandmother on the Liverpool Care Pathway, or in America on the Chicago Care Pathway a few years down the pike after we adopt ObamaCare.  Some death panel of bureaucrats will promulgate the rules that save the system money.

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.