A British Final Solution to Excessive Health Care Costs

As part of Barack Obama's "solution" to America's health care crisis, our government is trying to reduce costs wherever it can.  We've previously examined one way our government is trying to trim health-care spending: by making it more difficult to get new medical treatments approved.  The fewer new treatments, the faster people will die and the less money the government will have to spend on health care.

Britain, with its famous National Health Service, has a similar problem coming up with the money to fund everything.  Because Britain does so much less drug research than America, there's no scope to cut back in that area; they've already cut everything there was.  Instead of throwing up barriers to research, British bureaucrats had to be content with simply not letting their health service pay for the newest treatments because they were "too expensive."

The British have their own innovative ways of addressing health care and pension costs, however.  It's always instructive to learn from their experience, particularly in matters pertaining to health care.  Health care is particularly vital just now, as Mr. Obama seems to be about to change nearly everything about the way in which we care for the sick.

Liberals love to point to the British National Health Service as a model for how to manage health care, but they somehow leave out such trivial details as the British system not using the latest treatments in order to save the taxpayer's money.

Given that the bureaucrats at the NHS are perfectly willing to let sick people die because treating their illnesses would cost too much and break the budget, it should be no surprise that some British luminaries are saying that mentally impaired people have a "duty to die" and save the health service even more money.  The Sun reports:

Medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock, 84, said senility sufferers were a burden to their families and doctors.

And she said there was nothing wrong with them feeling they had a "duty" to opt for euthanasia for the sake of others.

She said: "If you are demented you are wasting people's lives, your family's lives and you are wasting the resources of the NHS." [emphasis added]

A demented person may or may not be wasting the lives of those who love them, but caring for senile people certainly consumes significant NHS resources.  This unarguably valid observation may or may not be particularly palatable, but as a member of the House of Lords, Baroness Warnock is a high-ranking member of the British establishment whose views matter to many:

Baroness Warnock has served on many Lords committees including those dealing with medical ethics and scientific procedures and has worked with the Archbishop of Canterbury. [emphasis added]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, supposedly the head of the Church of England, lost some points when he said that sharia law was certain to be accepted in England, but anyone who hob-nobs with him and works on Parliamentary committees concerned with medical ethics is well within the mainstream of establishment thought.

Baroness Warnock is perfectly correct in observing that it costs a great deal of money to care for a demented person.  She's equally correct in pointing out that it would save the nation's taxpayers a great deal of money if they'd just do the right thing and die.

Why stop with the demented?  There are plenty of other "members" of society who, while not demented, represent a much heavier drain on the taxpayers than the odd geezer afflicted with bats in the belfry.  Welfare recipients not only collect lots of money from taxpayers for maintenance and health care, they breed!

In "Downfall of a decent clan," the Daily Mail described the history of a family whose grandparents were solid working people but whose current generation are being raised by the government instead of by their parents:

What you see here is a tragic map of social breakdown: families who once stood on their own feet being replaced by single parenthood, multiple partners, reliance on State benefits and, perhaps inevitably, children being looked after by the local authority.

What emerges is a fascinating, if bleak, pattern of gradual social disintegration. It surely resonates with what is happening in many other Northern, white, lower working-class communities. An epoch has passed.

Karen Matthews is a striking figurehead for this generation.

She has never been in regular work yet receives £400 a week benefits, having had seven children by five different men.

Although jobless, Ms. Matthews has no need to establish a permanent relationship with a husband because the welfare system pays her expenses and her health care.  Her paramours have no reason to take responsibility for her children - so they don't.

Society always gets more of anything government subsidizes including parentless children.  The overall result is that women who can't find jobs have more children than productive women.  Where's that going to lead?

If it's OK to encourage senile people to die, what about encouraging fertile welfare recipients to die, preferably before reproducing further?  Vice President Joe Biden said that (except for Mr. Obama's cabinet members) it's everyone's patriotic duty to pay taxes; is it everyone's duty to save the government money by cutting its costs?  Offing the odd welfare mother would not only save the money going to her, it would prevent her from producing more welfare recipients.

Baroness Warnock may be on to something.  Stay tuned.