Who needs old people anyway?

What follows, coming our way via Mark Shea, is actually a couple of weeks old but I missed it somehow and something tells me many have missed it:

An eminent British doctor told a meeting of the Royal Society of Medicine in London that every year 130,000 elderly patients that die while under the care of the National Health Service (NHS) have been effectively euthanized by being put on the controversial Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), a protocol for care of the terminally ill that he described as a “death pathway.”

Dr. Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, claimed that doctors are putting people on the LCP without proper analysis of their condition, citing “pressure on beds and difficulty with nursing confused or difficult-to-manage elderly patients” as factors.

According to the Daily Mail, the doctor sounded the alarm that of the approximately half million deaths in Britain each year of elderly people who are in hospital or under NHS care, about 29 percent, or 130,000, are patients who were on the LCP.

The Liverpool Care Pathway, developed by the Royal Liverpool Hospital and the Marie Curie hospice in the 1990s, and described by its formulators as a “template” to guide the care of the dying, was approved in 2004 by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the government’s health scrutiny body in charge of rationing health services. 

Did you catch that?  A government health scrutiny body (what people with brains would call a death panel) with the acronym of NICE.

The devil has a wicked sense of humor does he not?

Are you laughing?

You won't be laughing long.