Death Panel Update: British Journal Article Recommends Dehydrating Dementia Patients to Death to Save Money

Coming soon to Obama’s America…

Britain’s Socialist Health Care System Euthanizes 130,000 Elderly Patients Every Year

A recent editorial in the British Medical Journal recommends dehydrating dementia patients to death to save money.
Lifesite News reported:

The courts should not interfere with doctors who want to dehydrate to death incapacitated patients who are a drain on scarce financial resources, according to an editorial in this week’s edition of the prestigious British Medical Journal.

Raanan Gillon, emeritus professor of medical ethics and former chairman of the Institute of Medical Ethics governing body, wrote that a ruling last year by the High Court against dehydrating an incapacitated patient to death was “profoundly disturbing” because it took the life and death decision-making power out of the hands of doctors and required that the principle of the “sanctity of life” take precedence over other considerations.

The judgment, he said, “threaten[s] to skew the delivery of severely resource-limited healthcare services towards providing non-beneficial or minimally beneficial life prolonging treatments including artificial nutrition and hydration to thousands of severely demented patients whose families and friends believe they would not have wanted such treatment”.

He complained that the ruling required that, under the “stringent” Mental Capacity Act, in order to remove “life prolonging treatment” like a feeding and hydration tube, the patient himself must have left a legally binding “advance decision” in writing, and that previous casual or unrecorded statements to relatives were not sufficient grounds.

The editorial, titled, “Sanctity of life law has gone too far,” said that unless it is overturned, the court ruling “will gradually and detrimentally distort healthcare provision, healthcare values, and common sense.”

Its logical implication, Gillon wrote, is that “doctors should no longer decide, in consultation with those who know their incapacitated patients, whether life prolonging treatment including artificial nutrition and hydration will be in their patients’ best interests.”

Isn’t socialized medicine grand?

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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Thanks for sharing!