Britain's NHS Paying Doctors to Put Elderly on "Death Lists"

"Now let me be clear. Sometimes folks have to die, and it's up to the betters to determine when and how they are treated during these moments that we will make sure are their final moments. It's only fair."

And the Obama Administration and the Democrats love the NHS so much. Makes you wonder...

From The Daily Mail article by Jonathan Petrie and StephenAdams:

GPs have been paid bonuses to put elderly patients on controversial ‘death lists’ in an attempt to save the NHS money by cutting the number of people who die in hospital. 

They have been given £50 a time to draw up ‘end-of-life advanced care plans’ for patients they predict will pass away within a year.  

The payments are designed to encourage doctors to start talking about death with elderly and seriously ill patients and to keep a record of where, ideally, they would like to die.
Those behind the ‘yellow folder’ scheme – so named as that is where the care plan forms are kept – insist its main aim is to give patients a better death. 

But critics say it was designed to save money and could result in people being denied treatment or help. According to documents seen by The Mail on Sunday, a ‘key objective’ of the project, trialled in eastern England, has been ‘to shift the place of death’ away from hospitals so ‘reducing .  .  . healthcare costs’. 

Every death that takes place outside of hospital saves the NHS almost £1,000, official calculations show. Average hospital deaths in England costs the NHS £3,065 but those elsewhere cost only £2,107. 

Our latest report comes three months after The Mail on Sunday revealed ambulance crews can refuse to take extremely ill people to hospital if they have stated on their care plan they want to die at home.  

Dr Gillian Craig, a retired geriatrician, questioned why GPs were being offered an extra payment for having a difficult conversation.  

‘Why should a GP be paid for this conversation, as opposed to any other?’ she said. ‘I feel doctors are paid very well and there should be no extra payments. Anything else is open to abuse and misuse.’ 

She also feared that patients signing up to die in their own home may unwittingly be ‘closing the door on potentially life-saving hospital treatment’. She explained: ‘A doctor may not realise that, while the person appears to be dying, they actually have a reversible condition.’ 

The GP bonus scheme rewarded doctors at 41 practices in Ipswich and East Suffolk, who were paid £50 for each care home patient they signed up to an end-of-life plan.
Patients were asked to stipulate where they would like to die, whether they wished to be resuscitated, and what drugs they wanted in their final hours. Ambulance services and out-of-hours doctors’ services were informed. 

The family doctors were also asked to sign up elderly people living in their own homes, although they were not paid the £50 bonus in these cases. The ‘pilot’ project ran for two years from July 2011 to this September and was deemed ‘successful’. 

Ipswich and East Suffolk Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), which ran the scheme, has refused to say how much was paid out in total. Stated benefits of the scheme include improving the quality of end-of-life care – but also ‘reducing emergency admissions, length of stay, use of unnecessary treatments and healthcare costs’.  

[...]  

"Dr Anthony Cole, acting chairman of the Medical Ethics Alliance, said: ‘I think it’s got everything to do with money, with the cost of a hospital bed being £200 a day.’ He added there was ‘a real danger’ patients might not realise the choice could lead to them not having medical support in their final days.

Yeah, I always like the term "unnecessary treatments." What is necessary and unnecessary is generally determined in hindsight--  except when trying to save costs by a unsympathetic government. I mean, hey, it's not their neck. Then potentially lifesaving procedures are deemed unnecessary and people die needlessly. And then you hear the chorus of Leftists chant about "the greater good" and how that the person was going to die anyway, and he/she was old anyway, and they couldn't waste scarce resources on them, etc.

Sorta sounds like "death panels," huh? But those were just the delusions of an evil  racist or something...

UPDATE: Keeping with the health care topic, John Nolte at Breitbart has noted "The Top Five ObamaCare Catastrophes the Media Refuse to Cover"

They are:

1. Millions are Losing Their Health Insurance

2. Premium Increases on Working and Middle Class

3. Obama's One-Year Delay On Business Mandate Strands the Middle and Working Class
 
4. ObamaCare's Effect On the Unemployed and Under-Employed

5. The Working Poor are Getting Hammered

Go check it out at the above link.