You are right these conclusions can be horrible.

The British are not subjects, thats a myth because we have the Queen and the Royals. The British are citizens and have been since the Nationality Act of 1948 (confirmed by the Nationality Act of 1981)

If I consider my own family, my wife would have died before we had our first child, had it not been for a system which created fully surgically equipped and staffed hospitals at town or local level (many now closed). She would have died on three occasions since; we probably would not have our daughter at all; my parents, even with the private healthcare they paid for, probably wouldn’t have lived to the same old ages or done so in comfort. An injury our son sustained last year would probably have removed all our savings and pensions as he was not in position to be insured against that kind of accident (he was insured for the emergency surgery in a Tunisian – socialist – hospital which meant he kept his leg almost intact). Many of my friends would now be dead, or housebound, or consigned to residential care years if not decades before their time.

I know one young lady whose family simply doesn’t have any wealth, despite being very hard-working people, whose complications in life from birth would have been an intolerable burden in the US system. Here she has been through great difficulties, dozens of operations, but is a great person and inspiration to others. It would indeed be terrible if the so-called Liverpool Care Path (if you want to demonise something, first give it a name!) had resulted in that person not existing because of a consultant’s judgment that physical complications were too great for the baby to be viable. It was good that when the NHS was a complete system, before its destruction in the interests of private enterprise and for-profit ownership, no such decision was made.

We are in Scotland, where the venal commercialisation of national healthcare has been resisted; it hasn’t been sold off, and like many services here is never going to destroy the life of a family. Coastguards, mountain rescue, fire services, paramedics, police, dentistry if you’re lucky, general practica and hospital services even if you’re not – this is the infrastructure of society for which we pay fair taxes, and people for the last 60 years paid taxes to help build. And it’s free, and we support many extras and voluntary services with donations as well. England and Wales do rather worse, the rot of crony capitalism has already cut the heart out of society, and now threatens to remove its brain as well and leave just a calculator in place. Scotland may yet have that to come, if we get independence – it’s been the Scots, over the centuries, who have been both the best socialists and the most ruthless capitalists of all, simultaneously. And the best doctors and surgeons too, back when learning the craft meant murdering the occasional anatomical subject on the way.

I also love many aspects of the US approach, and I know that there are far more privately-funded non-profit charity services than we have (possibly because we have not needed them).

But when arguments come round to say, don’t expect the state to help, learn to help yourselves – I fear that what actually happens is that a wealthy and controlling minority are the ones who end up ‘helping themselves’ by profiting the lives, afflictions, misfortunes and deaths of others.

There are huge pressures within the NHS to contain costs. Dead patients generally incur few additional costs. Marginal patients, otoh, can be EXTREMELY expensive. There’s a simple way to turn the latter into the former using “natural causes” which takes the onus off of those performing the, er, transition.

Remember, it’s not murder when the government does it for the good of the people.

BTW, my friend’s daughter is 15, recovering from a brain tumor, and working on her second million in treatment here in the heartless U.S. system. She would be dead if she lived in the UK.

I wish people would take a look at about 3 minutes of that film and then come back and see if their views on infanticide have changed.

One could make the case that there is no obligation to accept the intubation or an IV, and that these medical interventions can be withdrawn. Even under circumstances where this could be the case one would still have to attempt to provide adequate nutrition and water through normal means, even if more difficult.

Well, seppuku (the proper term) also requires that someone behead the person shortly after the self-impalement. Not exactly the cleanest of deaths.

And if he weren’t “Stephen Hawking” and did not have a net worth over 10,000,000 GBP, and if he were instead, Thomas Thompson, Queens Road, Liverpool; How long would it take the NHS to starve him to death?

For your record, American Conservatives aren’t even vaguely similar to your British Conservatives. We are Citizens, they and you are subjects.

The reason you read these stories is not because the doctors feel guilty: no, they just want more options to kill people.

Basically, anyone quoting The Mail might as well quote FOX News as well. They’re about as unbiased and useful as “news” sources.

For the record, the NHS is something even conservatives here want to keep. This story reminds me of the hilarious one tagged with Stephen Hawking and how some media pundits imagined he’d be euthanised were he British and used the NHS…

We are all terminal, the question is when. Will you wait for the government to decide that for you?

In the comments, several spoke of how starvation / dehydration was a less painful way to die. Self-starvation is a personal choice, the LCP protocols amount to the execution of those considered undesirable to a faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy.

As they used to say in “The West”: Get a whip, hangin’s too good for ‘em!