Health care rationing, ultimately an effect of any attempt at socialized medicine, inevitably includes care limitations for those determined least likely to benefit from treatment. That usually includes the elderly and those with lifelong illnesses or injuries, including some of our true American heroes, our veterans. From The Christian Post:
The nation’s largest faith-based organization of physicians warned Wednesday of the potential for pro-suicide ideology to seep into law and government policy. More specifically, the Christian Medical Association (CMA) pointed to the pro-suicide influence in a controversial Veterans Administration (VA) manual and a section of the main House healthcare overhaul bill.
“As physicians, we recognize the value of advance planning and counseling and appointing a personal healthcare proxy,” commented Dr. Gene Rudd, senior vice president of the 16,000-member CMA. “The VA manual goes a step further, however, subtly raising with vulnerable patients the possibility that physical impairments might make their lives, in the words of the manual, ‘not worth living.’
The 52-page manual, entitled, “Your Life, Your Choices: Planning for Future Medical Decisions,” lists scenarios such as being in a wheelchair, needing kidney dialysis, or requiring a feeding tube and then asks the patient to consider whether those situations might make his or her life “not worth living.” It also includes guilt-inducing scenarios such as “I can no longer contribute to my family’s well being,” “I am a severe financial burden on my family” and that a veteran’s situation “causes severe emotional burden for my family.”
“When the government can steer vulnerable individuals to conclude for themselves that life is not worth living, who needs a death panel?” posed Jim Towey, president of Saint Vincent College and founder of the nonprofit Aging with Dignity, in a recent opinion piece featured in the Wall Street Journal. “One can only imagine a soldier surviving the war in Iraq and returning without all of his limbs only to encounter a veteran’s health-care system that seems intent on his surrender,” added the former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.
Simply horrible. When will the madness end? Perhaps in 2012.
