I do accept fully that we are going to have to ration healthcare and a lot more besides. However, I am completely creeped out by and against the state being involved things like euthanasia. Far better for the state to just come out and baldly put the hard options to the people. I'm pretty sure that people would make the right choices. That is to say, if it was clear that extensive healthcare intervention in the, say, over 75s meant that significant healthcare intervention was not available for working people with families in, say, their 30s people would choose to direct those resources at the 30 year olds.
In which case, the inevitable question arises as to why our governments are not putting those hard choices to people and are, instead, bringing in euthanasia by the back door via the sinisterly entitled "Liverpool End of Life Care Pathway" (which has now been dropped due to a public backlash. See
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013 ... ent-review), or by simply quietly (in other words, undemocratically and unaccountably) reducing the types of treatment and extent of treatments available. Not to mention, covertly extending waiting times via various ruses.
I think the reasons for the above are twofold. Firstly, national politicians are basically cowards and don't want to be the first to give the bad news to people. Secondly, if they did give the bad news, people would only accept it if it was accompanied by a more general massive redistribution of power and wealth from the top of society to the rest. Back to that old "we're all in this together" issue.
And we all know our political class will do
anything to avoid that prospect. So utterly infiltrated and corrupted are they by those who hold all the wealth and power. Indeed, it's all but impossible to tell the pigs from the farmers these days. They are more or less one and the same, at least in terms of the top political decision makers.
