According to reports in the British media, the National Health Service (NHS) has publicly ruled that, “Patients cannot rely on the NHS to save their lives if the cost of doing so is too great.”
What happened to “universal” healthcare? Sounds more like “government” healthcare. Shocking? Not really.
The judgment overrules advice from The National Institute for Clinical Excellence’s (NICE) own citizen's council, which recommended two years ago that it should adopt a "rule of rescue" as an essential mark of a humane society.
According to the citizen’s council, individuals in "desperate and exceptional circumstances" should sometimes receive greater help than can be justified by a "purely utilitarian approach." The council, 27 members of the public chosen to be representative of lay opinion, backed the idea by 21 to 6.
The move was criticized by the British Medical Association, which said doctors had a duty to do their best for patients.
Pretty clear battle lines: cost-based care versus patient-centric care. Government dictate versus physician empowerment.
The NICE report, “Social Value Judgements,” states that treatment may also be refused to elderly patients if the benefits are deemed too low or the risks too high.
Let’s see a political candidate put that on a bumper sticker for “universal” care.
More information on these draconian policies can be found here.
At the same time that British patients are being denied approved care, thousands of terminally ill cancer patients are to be offered the chance to take experimental drugs.
Per a new report in The Guardian, “In cases where the NHS can do nothing more, cancer sufferers will be allocated places in government-backed clinical trials of unlicensed treatments that can prolong some people's lives. A major expansion of the government-funded experimental cancer medicine network will give hundreds, and eventually thousands, of patients the opportunity to join trials of novel therapies which scientists hope to develop into effective new drugs.”
So, on the one hand, no approved drugs for critically ill people – but it’s fine to let them be guinea pigs.
The full Guardian story can be found here.
Is that what they mean by “means testing?”
Is this what our political candidates and their surrogates mean by "universal" care?
SiCKO indeed.
