There's always a price for everything or as they say in certain circles, TANSTAAFL, or There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Politicians though increasingly build their promises on a government bureaucracy that will give you a free lunch. Of course the government bureaucracy isn't free and there's a hell of a tab to pick up for the lunch too.
The problem with offering pie in the sky though is someone has to pay for it. Medicine is justifiably a human right, but when doled out by the government comes packaged with a massive bureaucracy to implement and distribute and manage it. While the governments promised a lot, reality interferes naturally. Drugs and doctors don't grow on trees.
Socialized medicine may give away a lot, but it has to stagger carefully what it gives away and lower the quality. Americans may go to Canada for cheap drugs but Canadians will go to America because America offers the procedures they need, without having to wait months for them. Wards in England are a national disgrace and a nightmare with nursing shortages, mixed sex wards and severe cleanliness problems. France's broken health care system is climbing the ranks of election campaign issues.
For parts of the 19th and most of the 20th century, civic medicine has made great strides. Health care and hygiene came to the slums, diseases were fought and conquered. Much of what was accomplished was toted up as yet further evidence that government programs when applied to social problems could create an ideal society.
As social prosperity increased, lifespans increased and birth rates fell. In America they fell somewhat, in Europe they fell drastically. So drastically that Europe from the English coastlines to the Russian tundra is facing the loss of millions of people and the depopulation of entire areas. This would have been a severe enough problems in and of itself, but a system in which younger worker's pay is leveraged to provide social services for them and for retired citizens cannot survive a gap in the birth rate any more than you can build a building with a missing two stories in the middle.
Immigration was meant to make up for that but of course immigration only makes things worse. On paper immigration seems like an easy way to make up for a birth rate shortfall. But immigration is not some sort of clone factory stamping out fresh new young workers to take their places at the desks and counters of tomorrow. Immigration meant importing entire families, often in three generations, from the third world, most with health care needs vastly outweighing those of the natives. And then there are the social problems.
Using immigration as a stopgap solution for the birth rate was a lot like a thirsty man at sea drinking salt water. It made things a good deal worse and placed massive stresses on socialism's free lunch pail. This wasn't so much a problem for the government bureaucracies though as for the nation's citizens. The bureaucracies were perfectly happy with the infusion of third worlders as it meant more jobs for them and expansions of their programs. The bonus crime, diseases and social unrest was manna from heaven for them. The worse things got, the more funding they could demand for their departments.
For the Western nations as a whole though it was a horrific disaster that undermined their social fabrics, created war zones in formerly peaceful small towns and of course gave them a whopping huge bill for the whole thing.
But still the squeeze was on and immigration only made it worse. You could squeeze it by cutting off social services for deadbeat immigrants, at least for the illegal ones, but no municipality in Europe and America would hear of that. It's not only racist but it's equivalent to taking away a farmer's milk cows just when he expects years of use from them.
That leaves squeezing the elderly and the disabled through euthanasia. And that's exactly the situation where disabled patients in England sue to not be disconnected from life support and are denied. Euthanasia is declared to be a human right, but it is not only applied to those who actively wish to die, but to those whom the bureaucracy decides should die.
The resource shortfall has to be made up from somewhere and the elderly are no more use to anyone as far as the bureaucracy is concerned and there is a whole lot of them about. As immigration further strains the health care system, choices are made. Alfred has to die, so Mahmood can get treated for three diseases that had formerly been eradicated in the Western world.
It's not only Europe. It's America too. A family friend recently passed away in no small part because the hospital he was in decided he should die. His feeding tube was disconnected and not reconnected for days despite pleas for his wife. Doctors pressured her repeatedly to disconnect him from life support and would not respond to her questions about his condition. She stayed by his bedside but in the end they got what they wanted.
Another acquittance some years back found that her uncle had been disconnected from life support without her authorization leading to his death. When she demanded answers, she was told, "He lived his life."
He lived his life, is the epitaph of a lot of elderly men and women dying under socialized medicine or perhaps being outright murdered. Eugenics today is a dirty word, but the distinction between eugenics as practiced by the Germans or practiced under socialism today, is the definition of "Life Unworthy of Life." The Germans applied it to the mentally ill, the disabled and a variety of categories including the Jews. Today it's often applied to the disabled, babies and the elderly, whose "Quality of Life", a euphemism that could proudly be translated into the German, is measured, found wanting and disposed of.
Peter Singer, one of the moral and ethical authorities of modern medicine, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne, has endorsed killing disabled newborns and mentally disabled elderly. Singer isn't some obscure crank, he's the leading inspiration of the animal rights movement.
Singer premises the right to life on "the ability to plan and anticipate one's future." In a bureaucracy of course no one has much ability to plan and anticipate one's future and accordingly have no right to live. Like Nazi eugenics, such selection targets the weakest and most vulnerable people in a society by the government.
The most common reasons for disapproving of eugenics have been racial, rather than the moral argument that murder is simply wrong. Modern eugenics instead of targeting racial minorities, targets the weakest people on behalf of minorities. The selection is made to prioritize social services for third world immigrants, over the nation's own disabled and elderly citizens. The resource gaps created by socialized medicine have to be balanced and the scales weighed. Alfred must die, so Mahmood may live.
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It is indeed a vicious cycle. Immigrants are brought to the US in ill health, many suffering from AIDS/HIV, pregnant, or unwilling to use birth control for religious reasons and create a huge strain on the US medical system.
ReplyDeleteAnd we see a reversal of priorities in the medical system. Huge amounts of money spent on AIDS prevention and birth control, huge amounts on prenatal care for immigrants, many of whom are from countries where birth control is prohibited for religious reasons.
Families of the elderly are encouraged (if not coerced) to sign "Do Not Resuscitate" and "Do Not Intubate" orders.
The usual arguments involve "quality of life." Sanctity of life and morality is rarely if ever a consideration to the hospitals. Family wishes are ignored. Nursing homes are "too expensive", the elderly only have so long to live and so most hospital bioethics boards typically hound families until they're exhausted, give in, and sign DNRs and DNIs.
Despite their feign concern for the patient's quality of life, other matters of comfort such as adequate pain control, turning often enough to prevent deep and painful bed sores are ignored. In my mother's case, despite repeated requests and demands that her call button be placed within reach, the nursing staff repeatedly put in where she could not reach it; and she was much too weak to call out for help or pain medications.
We finally had to transfer her to another hospital. But even there, treatment was less than ideal. And at times, downright cruel. They wanted to insert a chest tube using only a local anesthetic. As her health care proxy I refused to sign permission until they changed the consent form to include the use of an IV medication for sedation and pain control--and insisted on watching them place the vial at her bedside.
I recall a nurse in nursing school tell me once that there should be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Human Beings.
Hospitals just want them dead and out of the way so they can spend their research dollars on experimental treatments. The more uninformed the patients are(such as immigrants)the better--for them.
Socialism in any form is the death of free enterprise and individualism. Socialism is Communism and should be fought and destroyed wherever it is found.
ReplyDeleteSocialism destroys freedom and individuality, stifles the imagination and gives far too much power to government while treating people like morons who need their chins wiped for them.
Doctors should not be run by the government, which has proven already their incompetance at so many things (education for one).
People like Hillary who loves this crap will not be subject to it either. They can pay their way into good care.
For those who cannot, just wait til you have to wait a year for much needed surgery under a socialized plan.
This is why Canadians opt to come here for important surgeries.
But like with Hanoi Jane Fonda and her ilk who like to fool around with things to help the "little folk" whom they look down on. Of course, being the incompetant jerks they are, they don't know what they are doing.
Government should keep its mits out of a whole lot of stuff.
you know, it hit me once how much the liberals look down on immigrants.
In a washroom of a giant super store I saw a sign over the sink in spanish with directions about how to wash your hands!!!
Not why.. not please do.. but "how to"
Did you ever see those signs years ago for other immigrants?
Signs in Polish or Gaelic or German or Dutch or Italian?
My 82 year old mother was very ill having under gone two hip replacements in the same hip. They were in a big hurry to get her up and walking after surgery but her bones were so fragile that when they stood her up the screws broke right through the bone of her hip and they had to re-do it. After, she was in a wheelchair and because of a blood clot they put her on blood thinner. They were aware she had two strokes previously and the inevitable happenend - she began to bleed out into her brain. She went in and out of conciousnesss. The prognosis was very poor. She couldn't eat. We put her on palliative care. We wanted to make her comfortable. It was her choice that nothing heroic be done for her. My sister and I began to notice they weren't even giving her water. When we told them we don't want her to suffer thirst they seemed genuinely surprised. Did they think we wanted to watch our mother die of thirst in front of our eyes? I wouldn't do it to a dog.
ReplyDeleteNeedless to say my mother passed but it was because it was time, not because her organs shut down due to lack of water.
My Mom died a year ago today (March 11, 2007). She was 93. She had to go for a "temporary" stay in a "nursing facility" to ostensibly recover from one illness, and when she went there the lack of sanitation gave her another that is probably what killed her.
ReplyDeleteBy the time I realized how serious her condition had become and had her transferred to a hospital, it was too late. They never told me how serious her condition was. They just didn't care. And before she got sick nurse "Kavorkian" (I don't remember her real name) told me. "She's old. She's lived her life."
They not only don't care, they do, as you say, seem to actively pursue euthanasia (or at least advocate a passive form of it) of those they deem unfit to continue.
I never knew how bad it had become, where the living are so helplessly under the control of the spiritually dead.
Giving free care to illegal aliens comes at a high cost to the middle class who pay the taxes. I know a working man who needed a cancerous kidney removed. He could not afford the insurance payments because the premium had risen so much. The hospital wanted $50,000 up front for the operation, yet would have done the operation for free if he had been an illegal alien rather than a born and bred American.
ReplyDeleteHe explored alternatives and found he could have the kidney removed in India for US$5,000 plus his airfare. He went and had the surgery. This is unfair to Americans. This is called Medical Tourism and is very common. Google "Medical Tourism" or see this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism
Udiyah did the right thing and so did her mother. For the most part, intubation of all sorts and resuscitation are heroic measures. There is nothing wrong with a DNR order IF it comes from the patient or his/her family who know his/her wishes. Sometimes a feeding tube and ventilator amongst others can be cruel. My Mom was at home, which is the best way to avoid these issues, and her appetite declined in the last month. She wasn't suffering from hunger and she didn't starve to death, she did not want a tube for nourishment. She simply let go but she did sip water and small amounts of clear broth. Westerners need to stop depending on homes to care for their sick parents. Your career may suffer but your conscience will be clear if you do the end stages care yourself. And yes, it is a HUGE SACRIFICE. I had a toddler at the time who didn't even know her mother for that year and it made a difference.
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