This
illustrious company - Gates, Warnock, Attali, Amis - joins this much-respected
body of medical luminaries which, also, has succumbed to entertaining the
unthinkable -
BMA: Let patients die 'to save cash'
THE leader of Scotland's doctors has questioned whether society can afford to pay thousands of pounds to keep terminally-ill people alive for weeks or months when health service budgets are under unprecedented strain.
Dr Brian Keighley, chairman of the British Medical Association Scotland, said in some cases tens of thousands of pounds were spent on drugs to extend cancer patients' lives for relatively short periods.
Thus has the
outrageous suggestion become the reasonable proposition and may now pass as so
mundane as to be almost unworthy of mention.
A gathering
momentum exerting constant and certain pressure via innocuous and persuasive
argument becomes an irresistible force. Thus does the unacceptable
seep into our moral overview and undermine our perceptions of right and wrong.
The misguided
and the malicious,- each sees in the Liverpool
Care Pathway an opportunity.
It presents
the possibility to mechanise and sanitise existence into a more bland and
acceptable version for the one. It removes accountability and responsibility
from the equation. Everything is reduced to the fine print of practice and
procedure. Even grief itself becomes a predetermined outcome.
For the
other, at a personal level, an unwanted and unwelcome ‘nuisance’ may be
removed without risk of disapproval or deprecation, neatly slotted into an
acceptable ‘care’ environment under the kind ministrations of the recognised
LCP protocols. At another level, healthcare in general and geriatric healthcare
in particular has more finite and predictable outcomes; forward-planning
becomes a less worrying, less onerous task in the management of its financial
consequences.
This last is the most certain of its aims and purposes.
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