Elderly patients ‘helped to die to free up beds’, UK doctor warns

“Obama Care” has provisions similar to this – aimed at those long-term care facilities in the U.S.

From the UK’s Daily Telegraph:

NHS hospitals are using end-of-life care to help elderly patients to die because they are difficult to look after and take up valuable beds, a top doctor has warned.

By Donna Bowater

20 Jun 2012

 Professor Patrick Pullicino has claimed that doctors are using a care pathway designed to help make people’s final days more comfortable as an equivalent to euthanasia.

The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) is used in hospitals for patients who are terminally ill or are expected to die imminently. Under the pathway, doctors can withdraw treatment, food and water while patients are heavily sedated.

Almost a third of patients – 130,000 – who die in hospital or under NHS care a year are on the LCP.

Professor Pullicino said he believed the LCP was being used as an “assisted death pathway” with patients placed on the LCP without clear evidence, according to the the Daily Mail.

The senior consultant at East Kent Hospitals told the Royal Society of Medicine he had personally intervened to have a 71-year-old man taken off the LCP and be treated successfully, despite claims he was expected to die within hours or days. He had arrived in hospital with pneumonia and epilepsy.

Rest of article here.

It’s Not About Health Care – It’s About the IT Systems and Technology

Check out our other website at http://www.exposinghealthcarereform.com and then read this guest post by researcher Vicky Davis:

Yesterday, (June 14, 2012) there was a Senate Hearing on ‘Medicare Physician Payment Policy’.  If you had any notion that health care reform was about providing medical care, then you need to watch this hearing.

If you think you’ll need to see a doctor anytime before the grim reaper pays you a visit, you need to watch this hearing.

If there is anybody that you love who must access the health care system on a regular basis, then you need to watch this hearing.

Medicare Physician Payment Policy

June 14, 2012

Program ID:  306594-1

Category:  Senate Committee

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/306594-1 link to video on cspan site

The business of health care is no longer about physician and patient.  The business of health care is about Information Technology and Systems Management of the practice of medicine.

In this hearing, you’ll hear words like accountability, improving quality and outcomes, pay for performance.  If you have paid attention to the education system reform, you’ll remember hearing the same words.  What we see with education system reform, we can anticipate with health care system reform.

Simply stated, the Information Technology and Systems business is taking over management of the world.  Barriers between government and the private sector, barriers between you and the businesses, institutions and government agencies that you interact with, barriers between our government and foreign governments are being eliminated.  You and your assets are simply entities in the collective (database) that are being aggregated for management.

When you watch this hearing, you should understand that the money that was being spent on doctors and hospitals will be spent on information technology and systems.  There will not be any savings (again refer to education system) – there will only be transfers of the money spent on doctors to the IT Technologists.  Actual medical care will decrease because it is the target for cost reductions.  Qualified medical doctors will be replaced with 2nd tier – and in the future, 3rd tier providers aided by a computer support system (like the people you call for tech support to fix your computer).   Profit growth for the IT Systems people will depend on reducing costs in the actual health care business.  Regardless of the marketing trigger words used by the IT marketing who sell the idea of higher quality, it won’t happen.  Quality will decrease and cost will increase because IT systems are a profit-seeking business unto themselves.