Don't treat the old and unhealthy, say doctors

[rayofreason]

Source: Telegraph

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone. £1.7 billion is spent treating diseases caused by smoking, such as lung cancer and emphysema

Fertility treatment and "social" abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as "outrageous" and "disgraceful".

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/27/nhs127.xml

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Well, that is one way to ration health care.

[Rosemary2205]

1. Dupe.

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. That's fine until it's you or a member of your family.

Then it's a different story.

[JDPriestly]

10. Right -- until it's you are your family.

The doctor must be young, thin, healthy and have no elderly, fat, unhealthy loved ones.

[Mojorabbit]

3. Wow

this is unbelievable.

[ingac70]

4. What the fuck do they mean "free"?

that is paid for through taxes. They need to give back the elderly and unhealthy all the taxes they've paid in so these fuckers could have a pay check.

[meow2u3]

18. Sounds like tax protest fodder to me

If these sociopaths have their way, elderly and sick Brits ought to stage a tax protest. If I were a Brit, I wouldn't pay taxes only to be turned away at the doctor's office.

[balantz]

5. Hey, sounds like a list that could grow to include all kinds of stereotypes.

How about the poor and uninsured, that cuts the chase on a whole lot of them who suck up the resources.

[LeftishBrit]

16. No...

in Britain, NHS treatment does not depend on insurance. People may have insurance for private treatment; but the NHS is for everyone, and no one needs to pay for it. So excluding 'the poor and uninsured' would be an irrelevant concept in Britain (except insofar as richer people *might* be able to pay privately for treatment that they have failed to get under the NHS).

And let's make a couple of things clear once again:

(a) the policy was proposed by a few doctors. It is not official policy in Britain, and is opposed by the majority of the BMA.

(b) the proposed policy, bad as it is, does not suggest that certain people should be excluded from treatments because they are less deserving or because they are seen as a burden on sociey. It suggests that they should be excluded from treatments if other factors mean that the *prognosis* is so bad as not to justify the cost. Quite a difference. Now, while doctors have to take prognosis into account in making medical decisions, I feel strongly (as do most British doctors) that this should not involve cost factors. So it's a bad proposal. But it is not intended as a means of rejecting people who are seen as 'sucking up the resources'.

[PittPoliSci]

6. psh.

is someone introducing healthcare legislation in america this week?

why else would such a disgusting article crop up?

[Historic NY]

7. Sounds like a Republican plan for health care.........n/t

[greenvpi]

9. I don't understand your post.

This is a good thing if it helps more people. There is only a limited amount of money so you have to make due the best you can with what you have. They don't have Republicans running their country like we have ours so thankfully they won't just print money to pay for healthcare like the US does with the military.

Are you against doing what is best for the most people?

[drm604]

8. Read the first comment under the article.

this is an incredibly misleading article, it is generally accepted that journalists use headlines such as "doctors calling for so and so" if the British medical association publish some form of policy, despite most doctors feeling that the BMA should not be about doing the governments job of public health. However in this case the fact that the BMA ethics comittee head says the opposite of the headline is not made clear.
A cautionary tale, fill in no surveys as they will be misinterpreted for headlines at will.
Why do journalists continue to run such poor quality articles at a time when the govt is trying to privatise the NHS by the back door.
Posted by dr steve edgar on January 27, 2008 11:43 AM

It sounds like this article may be purposely misleading in order to turn people against government funded health care. This misleading article will probably be used for propaganda in the US.

[jonnyra]

11. Exactly my first thought when I read it

Smells like republican propaganda to me.

[depakid]

12. It's the Telegraph!

For some reason, there's been a spate of inflamatory articles posted from this right wing source, despite the fact that it's well known for it's dishonest copy.

Not long back, DU'ers got baited into a "lovefest" regarding "women drivers," based on similar misrepresentations by the Telegraph.

C'est la vie at DU these days, I guess.

[drm604]

17. The problem is that most US readers don't have a clue about the political leanings of the Telegraph.

I know that I didn't. This, unfortunately, makes it a powerful propaganda tool.

Even so, I was suspicious of this article from the start. But most people haven't hung around at DU for years and honed their propaganda detectors.

[LeftishBrit]

15. Absolutely!

[soothsayer]

13. Yes, only treat the healthy! Not the icky sick people with their running noses

and their sucking head wounds. GROSS.

[LeftishBrit]

14. As I posted on another thread on the topic...

The Telegraph are usually accurate about concrete news items, though not always (e.g. they labelled Cynthia McKinney as a Republican!) but when they are discussing opinions, they often spin them in the right-wing direction.

The paper is often termed the 'Torygraph' and until recently was owned by Conrad Black.

It should be emphasized in any case that *no one here* is recommending not treating people because they are seen as a burden on society or having a bad lifestyle. Some doctors are suggesting that people should not get NHS treatment if other factors mean that the *prognosis* would be bad even with treatment. I think this has lots of dangers - e.g. one of my friends was born at 26 weeks when the viability limit was thought to be 28 weeks, and might not have survived if people had taken the 'bad prognosis' criterion too literally. However, there can be extreme cases: e.g. should public money have been spent on keeping Terri Schiavo 'alive', or on heart transplant surgery for a 95-year-old who would almost certainly die from the surgery itself?

[enlightenment]

20. Is any of the real debate,

as opposed to the screeching rhetoric of this article, coming out of the case of the baby born with the congenital disease that survived longer than expected . . . parents insisted the child be kept on the life support measures that were prolonging her(?) life . . . NHS wanted to remove care . . . wound up in the courts . . .?

Sorry, I'm drawing a complete blank on the names and particulars, but it was all over the press.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. Are you thinking of this case? It started some time ago - 2004

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3723656.stm

A year later - around Charlotte Wyatt's 2nd birthday - she had survived, and a judge ruled she should receive further treatment: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1836900,00.html

A year after that, the parents had split up: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8122-2406775,00.html

There's a blog (that claims 'it might be illegal for people in the UK to read' - a blogging site was told by a court to take it down) that says she was now in foster care (that was Dec 2007), and walking. I think they press has been told not to report much, if anything, to preserve Charlotte's privacy (and maybe the rest of the family).

[enlightenment]

23. Yes, that's the one. Thank you.

A sad story from all perspectives.

[moggie]

22. The Torygraph can be weird about health

badscience.net had a piece recently about a Telegraph article which claimed that "family doctors are threatening a revolt against Government plans to allow them to perform abortions in their surgeries". Turns out that (a) this was an informal poll on a doctors' chat site, and (b) a perusal of comments from the doctors shows that many of them had missed the point, thinking that the proposal was about surgical abortions rather than administering a pill. The first comment in that thread points out another recent misleading article in the Telegraph. Headline: "Abuse of cannabis puts 500 a week in hospital". Actual figure: 14.

[Briar]

19. So

doctors only want to treat the young and healthy? A good prescription for a very light workload!