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Britain's NICE: Don't Waste 'Scarce Resources' Keeping People Alive

June 12, 2009 (LPAC)—Want to know what to expect if the Obama team rams through its Nazi healthcare policy? Take a look at the "guidance" which Britain's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) provides to the National Health Service (NHS), on who should live or die.      

On Feb. 8, 2008, the Canadian pro-life website, wwwlifesitenews.com, publicized a shocking example of how NICE operates, that should make you shudder.      

Leslie Burke, a retired postal carrier who suffers from a degenerative motor neuron disease, sued the NHS in 2004 for the right not to be denied nutrition and hydration when he reached the point of being unable to communicate or swallow. He won the case in 2005 when a judge ruled that denying him nutrition or hydration would violate the European Convention on Human Rights. But Britain's General Medical Council and the Department of Health succeeded in getting the ruling overturned on appeal.      

On what grounds? The Department of Health's head of bioethics and scientific development argued that, according to NICE's guidelines, the NHS must retain the right to starve and dehydrate people to death, or "there would be considerable risk of inefficient use of NHS resources." She added that "clinicians should be able to follow the NICE [quality of life] guidelines without being obliged to accede to patient demands. If that principle were undermined, there would be considerable risk of inefficient use of NHS resources."      

This is the same NICE that the fascist economists advising President Obama think is a great model for a "reformed" U.S. healthcare system. Don't be fooled by the buzzwords: "cost-effectiveness" or "quality adjusted life year" (QALY).      

Hilary White, author of the February, 2008 article put it succinctly: the "ultra-utilitarian" philosophy that drives NICE's actions, she said, is "at odds with the classical, Natural Law, or Christian-based medical ethics that start with the principle, 'do no harm' to an individual patient." These new utilitarian principles, she adds, "require that some are judged worthy of treatment and others not."      

There is nothing that distinguishes NICE's actions from Adolf Hitler's October, 1939 declaration that there are lives "not worthy to be lived," which launched the Nazi euthanasia and mass murder program. One commentator on the case remarked, "it all boils down to two concepts that are increasingly intertwined in modern bioethics theory and practice. First is the so-called quality-of-life ethic that presumes to judge the worth of patients' lives according to their mental and physical capacities. Under this view, doctors or bioethicists may judge a life to be of such low quality that it is not worthy extending, irrespective of the patients' wishes."


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