By Cranky Housewife -
Hardly a day goes by where I am not haunted by the realization that our nation voted to approve death panels by reaffirming their support for Barack Obama, thereby stressing their preference for socialized medicine.
But, of course, death panels are just a lot of hokum that could never happen in civilized societies such as ours. We know this to be true because Nancy Pelosi assured us of that fact and Nancy Pelosi would never misguide the American people in order to achieve her collectivist goals. Would she?
Want to learn a pithy little slogan? How about "end of life pathways." Such a majestic, almost noble turn of phrase, is it not? Leave it the Brits to make neglect and torture sound ethical. You know what? In the UK, the hospitals are now under investigation by the NHS to determine whether the cash incentives that are offered for hitting "death pathway targets" influenced how doctors counseled patients on end of life decisions.
No-no-no. I'm sorry; did you think I was talking about the UKs treatment of their elderly and terminally ill adults? Oh. No. I'm not. And that's too bad because then we could all unilaterally lament the horrors of America's ghost of health care yet to come, let it pass easily from our minds and move our attention back to the more comfortable topic of our looming fiscal cliff which will serve as the impetus for such medical smoke and mirrors here in the US in right around a decade or so. Keep your shirt on. America's children and grandchildren will begin making those decisions for their baby boomer relatives in very short order. That's a given.
Yeah. Unfortunately, with regard to today's topic, I'm actually talking about British infants right now. The British press is reporting that parents of sick babies in the UK are being counseled to end the lives of their children so that hospitals can meet their "death pathway targets" and reclaim the hospital beds for healthier children. There's apparently a cash incentive for doing this. Not that the UKs socialists would ever concern themselves with profit, mind you. That rot is for the world's stinking, soulless capitalists.
The important thing here is that British doctors are not achieving an infant's "end of life pathway" by merely withholding treatment and giving the baby pain medication…as Barack Obama had once suggested would be the appropriate solution for that hundred year old woman who needed a pace maker. Per the Daily Mail, the UK has become a pioneering force in death solutions and is so far and beyond that kind of proposition that they are actually making our president's death strategies look amateurish and unimaginative.
The UK doctors achieve their death goals by having medical professionals withhold feedings and fluids from sick children. Parents are told that this is the most humane way to handle the situation because…wait for it…infants don't feel the pain of hunger or thirst. Which certainly comes as a surprise to anyone who has been jolted out of a sound sleep for a 2 AM feeding, but maybe that's just an anecdotal talking point that moms and dads use to make parenting sound harder than it is?
You know, come to think of it? Maybe the doctors have additional studies which encourage parents to let infants sit in their own waste because they are incapable of feeling wet too. Think how much money we can save on diapers and formula. Such an environmentally friendly solution for our nearly extinct planet. I mean – you'll want to run it by your pediatrician first and get his or her permission. Otherwise, it's child endangerment. Go figure.
Can't feel thirst or hunger. Oh. My. Good. Golly. I only wish I was kidding you. One aggrieved doctor has been quoted, "They [parents] wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped. They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby. Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days."
And the parents watch as their living, breathing albeit unhealthy babies literally shrivel up and die in excruciating torture over the course of two weeks.
I'm so sorry. Will you please explain this to me? Just how detached from natural instinct does a person have to be to believe that this is a good idea? How stupid and unschooled…? It's the UK for goodness sake. They've got the education system that America needs to model!
Oooh. I do believe I'm on to something there. But I digress.
One doctor testified that he alone starved and dehydrated ten babies in one neonatal unit in one hospital in Liverpool, England.
And that, my friends, is our first example of the death panels that don't actually exist in a single payer health care system. That's what Nancy Pelosi promised would never occur in our new European modeled program. Those are the conservative worst cast scenarios that the progressivists in America have been rebuking for more than four years.
You may now return to the comfort and security of our previously scheduled "fiscal cliff" coverage.
