I Hate To Bring Up Euthanasia Again, But Here It Is

[Annie]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/05/22/ixopinion.html

Starved for funding
(Filed: 22/05/2005)

Leslie Burke is a 45 year old man who has an incurable and degenerative brain disease. Sooner or later, he will be hospitalised and lose the ability to communicate. When that happens, he has asked that his right not to be starved or dehydrated to death be upheld by the doctors who treat him.

The Department of Health, along with the British Medical Association, opposes that right and is adamant that it will not guarantee to respect it unless it is forced to do so by the courts. So it has taken the decision of the High Court, which upheld Mr Burke's right not to be starved to death, to the Court of Appeal, in the hope of overturning it. A lawyer acting on behalf of Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, explained the basis of her position by saying that "life-prolonging medical treatment has very serious implications for the functioning of the NHS", and would lead to "inefficient and unfairly skewed use of resources".

This is the first time that the Department of Health has admitted what has long been obvious: that it stops feeding and hydrating patients, not because it is in their "best interests", but because it believes that it costs too much. The idea that it must be in a patient's "best interests" to be starved to death has always been nonsense. That, however, has not stopped health ministers and NHS officials from resolutely maintaining that particular fiction.

The Department of Health and the BMA refuse to recognise Mr Burke's right not to be starved and dehydrated to death because they fear it will create a generalised "right to treatment" - which in turn will mean that doctors will be obliged to provide medical treatment to terminally ill patients who want it, regardless of whether it will have any beneficial effect, and regardless of the cost.

Feeding and providing liquids to a patient too damaged to feed himself is not, however, medical treatment - any more than feeding a baby is medical treatment. It was categorised as such by the Law Lords in 1993, and for the sole purpose of allowing the judges to conclude that, in withdrawing food and liquids from Tony Bland (the Hillsborough victim then in a persistent vegetative state), doctors were not unlawfully killing him: they were merely not treating him. If doctors were not to be seen as licensed killers, those two activities had to be kept separate.

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[krisy]

Kathianne,I am curious about the stanse that our Department of Health takes on this kind of thing. Is this the stanse of the British DOH because they have a universal health care kind of system,and the government pays for all this care? Either way,for anybody,I think it is scary the things a government will spend their money on other than keeping someone that may be of sound mind,but not body alive.