Wednesday, December 5, 2012

More Reports from Britain on Obamacare's Template


From a major British newspaper, the Telegraph:
    "In the worse cases staff have overseen 'a kind of normalisation of cruelty', (Britain's Health Secretary) Jeremy Hunt told an audience of health professionals.
    "Managers were so 'buried in spreadsheets' that they had become 'blind' to the fact that patients were not being treated with dignity or respect, he said.
    "Poor care had become 'perhaps the biggest problem of all facing the NHS', Mr Hunt claimed in his strongest speech yet on the NHS, almost three months into his tenure as Health Secretary.
    "In a passionate speech, Mr Hunt cited numerous examples of appalling NHS care. He said: 'Just look at what has come to light in the last few years: patients left to lie in their own excrement in Stafford Hospital, with members of the public taking soiled sheets home to wash because they didn’t believe the hospital would do it.'"


More … from the London Daily Mail newspaper:
    “Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’. Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.
    “One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone. Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a  baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’. The LCP – on which 130,000 elderly and terminally-ill adult patients die each year – is now the subject of an independent inquiry ordered by ministers. …Earlier this month, an un-named doctor wrote of the agony of watching the protracted deaths of babies. …‘I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby.’ “

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