By Andrea Widburg
Except for the air you breathe, everything else in life is a finite resource. There are only two ways to allocate such resources: rationing or the free market. Rationing means those in power decide who gets what; the free market usually ensures that, through the profit motive and competition, the scarce resource will become more available at a better price. England’s National Health Service is all about rationing – and the latest example is a secret plan drafted in 2017 and 2018 stating that, in a pandemic, if things got sticky, anyone over 70 would be left to die:
The NHS drew up secret plans to refuse treatment to people aged over 70 in the event of a pandemic and to stop hospital care for those in nursing homes, it has been revealed.
Confidential government documents written following a pandemic training exercise in 2016 detailed plans to stop hospitals being overwhelmed by sacrificing vulnerable members of the population.
Under the plans, the Health Secretary could allow doctors to prioritise some patients over others who were placed on an ‘end of life pathway’ in the event of a ‘severe’ flu pandemic.
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Earlier this year, it was revealed that care homes were asked by the NHS to place ‘do not resuscitate’ orders on all residents during the worst of the pandemic in breach of guidelines.
Both the NHS and the government tried to distance themselves from the document, saying it was totally hypothetical, despite the “do not resuscitate” guideline that sounds exactly like the allegedly hypothetical plan. Many in England, including Dominic Cummings, a former chief advisor to Boris Johnson, said that “it was a ‘lie’ that everyone received care, saying ‘many people were left to die in horrific circumstances’.”
I’m siding with Cummings on this one. We know from the scandal of the Liverpool Care Pathway that socialized medicine providers have no problem denying medical care to those who no longer contribute to the system and are seen as deadweight in medical facilities. Under the Liverpool Care Pathway protocol, a plan to stop treating, or even giving food and drink to, cancer patients in the last phases of the disease, was instead used to kill as many as 130,000 elderly patients who could easily have recovered had they been treated.
In a free market system, doctors and hospitals must care about the patients because happy patients pay well. In a socialized medicine system, doctors and hospitals must care about the government because that’s the source of their paychecks. The patient is the last consideration, not the first.
I’ve long suspected that cost-saving was the reason that blue state governors dumped contagious people amongst the vulnerable elderly in care facilities. These people were no longer contributing to the state’s welfare systems but, instead, were taking money that could have been spent on illegal aliens and other criminals.
Bernie’s Medicare for All plan, which effectively socializes American medicine, will put every American on the Liverpool Care Pathway. If that happens, when the next big pandemic comes, the marketplace won’t save us; instead, the government will kill us.