Here's an article from the "Investor's Business Daily" which illustrates the perils of Socialized Medicine, especially for the elderly:

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticle ... 9168429529


Reform's Dead End
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, September 03, 2009 4:30 PM PT

Health Care: Can a day go by without the British producing another story highlighting the disaster of their government-run system? In the latest installment, we find that care for the dying might be a cause of death.

The benignly named Liverpool Care Pathway is not a death panel, but a group of experienced British doctors says it works like that.

In a letter to London's Daily Telegraph, the doctors say patients sometimes thought to be terminally ill are dying prematurely because of guidelines that are intended to ease the suffering of those at the end of their lives.

In this practice, fluids and medication are taken away from the patients and many are constantly sedated until they die.

"It is supposed to let people die with dignity, but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy," said Dr. Peter Hargreaves, one of the doctors who signed the letter. "Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway."

The early deaths are caused when the practice hides signs that a patient is actually improving. Hargreaves says he has taken patients off the pathway and watched them live significantly longer.

But, the Telegraph reports, he believes many doctors don't check "the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition" and pull them off the pathway.

Before anyone says that this sort of tragedy can't happen in America, consider the statements from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama administration health care czar. Despite his anti-euthanasia stance, he once wrote: "When the worse-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating (treatment) to the better-off is often justifiable."

A man in Dr. Emanuel's position will have no trouble putting his mark on the content of any legislation that Congress considers.

Democrats and the media fiercely deny that the House health care bill includes a death panel that would decide who is better off and who is not. But while the words "death" and "panel" may not appear consecutively in the bill, the point cannot be ignored.

In a nationalized system, treatment will be rationed by the state. Because resources are finite, it will fall to a bureaucracy to decide who lives and who dies.

President Obama says he doesn't favor a British-style system for the U.S. Yet he's made it clear that he supports a single-payer arrangement, which is what the British have.

He'd probably say he doesn't favor a death panel either, but we'll get one by another name if Congress passes its health care bill. Call it the Potomac Care Pathway, a sure road to premature death.