Health care in UK follow up

As I said the other day government health care means you do not get to decide whether you get to decide whether you get life saving treatment or not.  Someone else will decide whether your life is a good allocation of resources or not.

THE National Health Service should not have to give life- prolonging treatment to every patient who demands it because that would mean a crippling waste of resources, the Government said yesterday.

A lawyer for Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, said that a ruling granting a patient the right to request life-prolonging care had serious implications for the NHS.

The Department of Health, backing the GMC’s attempt to reverse the ruling, said that if that right were established, patients could demand other life-prolonging treatments.

Philip Sales, for the Health Secretary, told a panel of three appeal judges, headed by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers: “A general right, as identified (in the High Court), for an individual patient to require life- prolonging treatment has very serious implications for the functioning of the NHS.

Mr Sales said that the ruling had led to a confusion of the roles of doctor and patient — decisions over treatment were for doctors, not patients.

Read that last sentence carefully.  Decisions for treatment are for doctors not patients.  And the doctors decide whether it is “a waste of resources” for you to be treated or not.  Keep that in mind when someone advocates government health care.

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