Will Sick Babies Be Starved to Death Under Obamacare?

Doctor describes “horror” of Britain’s socialist healthcare system
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
November 30, 2012

A physician has told the British Medical Journal about the “unique horror” of watching a newborn baby shrivel up and die under a cost-cutting system of socialized healthcare that withdraws feeding tubes from sick and disabled babies, a method that could be replicated in the United States under Obamacare.

After speaking with doctors who have blown the whistle on how babies are being starved and dehydrated to death in British hospitals, an investigation by the Daily Mail has revealed that the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway end of life regime is being used to kill disabled newborns and young children. It was previously thought that the method was only being used on elderly and terminally ill adult patients.

The method has been criticized as a form of euthanasia because its primary purpose is to kill off patients quicker so as to free up more hospital beds and resources.

One physician spoke of how parents who gave permission for their babies to be put on the ‘pathway to death’ were making the decision without properly considering the abhorrent reality of what dehydration and starvation does to the human body.

“I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby,” the doctor writes. “I reflect on how sanitised this experience seems within the literature about making this decision.”

The doctor also dismissed the myth that the baby does not suffer during the process.
“Survival is often much longer than most physicians think…..Parents and care teams are unprepared for the sometimes severe changes that they will witness in the child’s physical appearance as severe dehydration ensues,” he wrote.
“Some say withdrawing medically provided hydration and nutrition is akin to withdrawing any other form of life support. Maybe, but that is not how it feels,” he wrote, describing the mixture of “compassion, revulsion, and pain” the care team had to experience in watching the baby slowly die.

Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), now under independent investigation by order of government ministers, is a process whereby a doctor identifies a patient who is likely to die and that patient is then heavily sedated while treatment is withdrawn, “including the provision of water and nourishment by tube.”

In a recent exposé, Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of Kent, revealed that of the 450,000 patients who die annually under the care of the NHS, 130,000 of them were on the Liverpool Care Pathway.

“If we accept the Liverpool Care Pathway we accept that euthanasia is part of the standard way of dying as it is now associated with 29 per cent of NHS deaths,” Pullicino said.

The Telegraph’s Gerald Warner notes that LCP represents “euthanasia by the back door.” Other doctors such as Dr. Peter Hargreaves have highlighted the fact that patients taken off LCP have gone on to live for “significant amounts of time.”

Because death occurs on average within 33 hours of a patient being put on LCP, the cost difference between two days of morphine and treatment of a condition for months or even years means the NHS is literally euthanising people to save money.

“In fact, Hargreaves noted, some patients may exhibit signs of dying when their bodies are merely reacting to sedation combined with dehydration and then “be wrongly put on the pathway.” Once a patient is sedated under the LCP, University of London geriatrics professor P.H. Millard told the Telegraph, “it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better.”

“Pullicino echoed many of these sentiments, saying that “patients are frequently put on the pathway without a proper analysis of their condition,” that “predicting death” at a specific time “is not possible scientifically,” and that, as a result, “very likely many patients who could live substantially longer are being killed by the LCP.”

Could a similar system of euthanasia become commonplace in America under Obamacare?

President Obama has repeatedly expressed his support for the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a group of doctors that would make decisions on cost cutting measures under Obamacare. Opponents of government-run healthcare have dubbed this a system of “death panels” that would have the power to refuse treatment to the elderly or severely ill patients, a de-facto form of mandatory euthanasia.

Last month, Obama adviser Steven Rattner acknowledged that rationed healthcare would be part of Obamacare, brazenly stating, “We need death panels.”

The idea that “death panels” would be introduced through Obamacare as a means of rationing healthcare was also discussed during an Aspen Institute conference in 2010 when Obama supporter Bill Gates argued that money should not be spent on treating the elderly.

During a question and answer session, Gates implied that elderly patients undergoing expensive health care treatments should be killed and the money spent elsewhere.

Gates said there was a “lack of willingness” to consider the question of choosing between “spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient” or laying off ten teachers.

“But that’s called the death panel and you’re not supposed to have that discussion,” added Gates.

Allowing patients to die via the horrifically slow and painful method of dehydration and starvation is not just restricted to the elderly and sick or disabled babies.

In a series of best-selling books, author and bioethics expert Wesley J. Smith has exposed how adults in the United States who regain consciousness after being comatose and are able to exhibit physical and emotional responses are also being starved and dehydrated to death.

If America mimics the Britain’s notoriously bad socialized healthcare system, thousands upon thousands of sick babies will likely be left to die excruciatingly painful deaths in the name of cost-cutting measures that amount to nothing less than a cruel and inhumane death sentence.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.