In a stunning development which nobody could’ve seen coming, life is becoming devalued in today’s culture. Details to follow.
Doctors in the UK Telegraph are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.
Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.
(So, pretty much, this amounts to sick people should not receive treatment.)
About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.
Among the survey of 870 family and hospital doctors, one in three said that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it were unlikely to do them good for long. Half thought that smokers should be denied a heart bypass, while a quarter believed that the obese should be denied hip replacements.
Managers defend the policies because of the higher risk of complications on the operating table for unfit patients.
I think the term that bothers me the most in that statement is the “unfit” part.
Compare this with about the 80 percent who said taxpayers should pay for “social abortions.”
Old people. Babies. Drinkers. Smokers. Obese. Who’s next? Humans.
January 28, 2008 at 4:09 pm
These days I find myself thinking that wherever old Adolf is right now, he must be laughing. The thousand-year Reich may have gone up in flames but from stories like this you start wondering who really won WWII. Lord have mercy.
January 28, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I don’t know where he is…but I doubt he’s laughing. But on your larger point I agree completely with you. We defeated fascism’s armies and slowly accepted their life view.
January 28, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Similar criteria are already used in hospitals in America when making decisions over organ transplants, surgeries, and distribution of other scarce resources. They give them to the people most likely to live, and lifestyle and psychological disorders are criteria. I don’t know why this would come as a shock. Is it really ethical not to consider age? Do you really believe that an 80 year old man deserves a heart transplant as much as a 17 year old boy? Would it really be ethical not to take their age into account when making such a decision?
January 28, 2008 at 9:24 pm
These sorts of decisions are made all the time in the Third World, where resources are scarce. Medical treatment is reserved for those who have the best chance of benefiting from them. The same is true in any Emergency Room or ICU in the U. S. Where resources are scarce, decisions on the best way of allocating those resources have to be made. It’s called triage.
The problem in the West is that we have lived for so many decades under the illusion that our resources are endless, so no one should be denied anything and, if they are, it can only be that dehumanizing eugenics/euthanasia is behind it all. We in the developed West are waking up to the fact that resources are limited and we are having to make some of the difficult decisions that those in the underdeveloped South have been making since forever.
Bob Hunt
Knoxville, TN
January 29, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Tiage and selective criteria used to find the best candidates for health care is qualitatively different than a neo-eugentic health-care system. I think the author is getting at the arbitrariness of some decision-making. After-all, AIDS/HIV has cost our society tremendously, but try to curtail promiscuity in the gay community..we can demonize a smoker for their nicotine habit, but no one confronts the natural consequences of anal/oral sexual activity and lifestyles.
What about promiscuity in the heterosexual community…we “protect” people by requiring seatbelt, bike helmets and closed-toe shoes…are we going to issue chastity-belts? Why not?
We provide free condoms, cheap birth control, federally-subsidized abortion…but we don’t punish the promiscuous for the sky-rocketing STD’s and high-rates of infertility due to the sex-in-the-city lifestyles of our population.
Why are the obese, diabetic smokers demonized when no accountability is expected of the promiscuous…who exact a tremendous economic and social cost to society?