In Britain’s Liverpool Pathway We Get A Preview Of Obamacare And Hell

Interesting stuff over at Red State:

It isn’t often that I open a story with a quote from a liberal but, as a Catholic, I have a great deal of affinity for Hubert Humphrey. As you read this you’ll see just how far the modern left has strayed from the liberalism of FDR, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.

Let’s stipulate in the beginning that modern medicine is a business. You don’t have a kindly doctor showing up at your home at 2am to treat a sick child and accept labor or chickens in return. Our hospitals are run by hard edged MBAs. Within the profession we’ve exchanged the kind and compassionate Dr. Ben Casey for the arrogant and abusive Dr. Greg House who knows best and your wishes be damned as the operating model.

As the saying goes, the difference between God and a doctor is that God doesn’t think he’s a doctor.

It is well known that about 30% of medical expenditures occur in the last year of life. I view this a tautological dodge because you usually don’t need a lot of medical care until you are near death and as no one knows which is the last year of their life it is a pretty useless metric… unless you can designate with certainty the last year of a patient’s life and then set out to minimize costs during that period.

Enter the Liverpool Care Pathway for the dying patient courtesy of the British National Health Service.