Night of the Living Death Panels

The guys over at Principalities and Powers take note of a real life "Death Panel," sorry, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence: Government "Care"

A headline up on the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper marks yet another reason not to trust government health care. "Sentenced to death on the National Health Service" is a line that doesn't mince any words. Seems those programs put in place by state run health care systems, which commence with such concern for patients, health, and care, come soon to be seen as cost centers by administrators desperate to cut costs regardless of patients, health, or care.

This is yet more evidence, if any were needed, that the end of life provisions the Democrats were attempting to include in their bills are indeed dangerous, no matter how neutral or anodyne the language. The trajectory is dark but predictable. The power over people's literal lives seems to be of a more intoxicating kind than just the power to make us recycle or pay huge portions of our earnings to the Treasury. The Dutch and the Swedes have also found that sending the old, the weak, and the terminal into that goodnight is a power doctors get a taste for, and one they soon begin using early and often, sometimes without even notifying the families. Especially when beds are scarce, budgets are strained, and the overwhelming directive from above is to cut costs.

There's more at the link. The issue, of course, is not whether or not there are "death panels" in the bill. The question is whether the bills will create a regulatory environment where the government is making such decisions. US progressives deny strenuously that this will be the result, but the sorry experience in a country that is culturally, politically and socially very similar to our own suggests that such rationing at pen-point is inevitable.

PS: Legal Insurrection notes that the Brits are also eliminating tonsillectomies. God forbid doctors be given the option of performing them on willing patients.