10/14/09 1 Of 5 times of London Robert Reich hhhhhhhhhh Obama adviser. He is the Kook not me.

Euthanasia of old people is happening in EU and proposed here. AN 80-year-old grandmother who doctors identified as terminally ill and left to starve to death has recovered after her outraged daughter intervened. Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after medics ruled she had only days to live, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding. The former school matron had been placed on a controversial care plan intended to ease the last days of dying patients. Doctors say Fenton is an example of patients who have been condemned to death on the Liverpool care pathway plan. They argue that while it is suitable for patients who do have only days to live, it is being used more widely in the NHS, denying treatment to elderly patients who are not dying. Fentons daughter, Christine Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital in Hastings, East Sussex, on January 11, says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

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Doctors say EU working week is killing patients Families 'kept in dark' by doctors over dying Ball, 42, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was astonished when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to make her more comfortable in her last days. Ball insisted that her mother was not dying but her objections were ignored. A nurse even approached her to say: What do you want done with your mothers body? On January 19, Fentons 80th birthday, Ball says her mother was feeling better and chatting to her family, but it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding. Fenton is now being looked after in a nursing home five minutes from where her daughter lives. Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in palliative medicine, is concerned that other patients who could recover are left to die. He said: As they are spreading out across the country, the training is getting probably more and more diluted. A spokesman for East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust, said: Patients needs are assessed before they are placed on the [plan]. Daily reviews are undertaken by clinicians whenever possible. In a separate case, the family of an 87-year-old woman say the plan is being used as a way of giving minimum care to dying patients. Susan Budden, whose mother, Iris Griffin, from Norwich, died in a nursing home in July 2008 from a brain tumour, said: When she was started on the [plan] her medication was withdrawn. As a result she became agitated and distressed. It would appear that the [plan] is . . . used purely as a protocol which can be ticked off to justify the management of a patient. Deborah Murphy, the national lead nurse for the care pathway, said: If the education and training is not

10/14/09 2 Of 5 times of London Robert Reich hhhhhhhhhh Obama adviser. He is the Kook not me. Euthanasia of old people is happening in EU and proposed here. in place, the [plan] should not be used. She said 3% of patients placed on the plan recovered. One in four families are not informed when doctors decide that a patient in hospital is dying under a widely used NHS scheme for palliative care, a national audit has found. Less than half of terminally ill patients and their relatives are offered religious or spiritual support in their final days and hours, while a quarter of doctors are not being trained within hospitals to deal with dying patients. The audit, seen by The Times, comes after the NHS was accused of having a tick-box culture of care that defines patients as dying without questioning whether they might recover. The criticism relates to the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), which is endorsed by the Government and many healthcare professionals as the best way to improve treatment for dying patients with cancer or other illnesses. About 20,000 people are estimated to die each year while being cared for under the guidelines.

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Guidelines open the door to debate on dying The nurse: some days I wish I worked in shoe shop Under the scheme, doctors and nurses collectively agree that there is no possibility of recovery. They then remove beneficial medicines and invasive medication, such as intravenous drips. They may also sedate the patients and withhold food and drink. However, a group of leading doctors has warned that the LCP may lead clinicians to focus too much on the outcome of death, when some patients might recover. Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics at St Georges Hospital Medical School, University of London, among a group of doctors who have publicly criticised the LCP, said: The risk as this is rolled out across the country is that elderly people with chronic conditions like Parkinsons or respiratory disorders may be dismissed as dying when they could still live for some time. If patients tell their doctors that they wish to die at home, that shouldnt be taken as an excuse not to treat them in hospital if their condition deteriorates but they still might recover with proper care. The National Care of the Dying Audit found that in hospitals where the pathway was used, nearly nine out of ten patients were made comfortable in the 24 hours before death, and checked at least every four hours to make sure that they were not having medication or fluids that could do more harm than good. But the guidance is to be updated this year to remind healthcare staff to improve communication with patients and relatives and to reassess regularly the complex decisions made at the end of life so that people can achieve a dignified and painless death. The audit, by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute in Liverpool and the Royal College of Physicians, obtained details from 155 hospitals in England of the deaths of almost 4,000 patients treated on the pathway last year. Of these, 39 per cent had cancer and 61 per cent had other conditions, including pneumonia, stroke, organ failure or dementia. The average age of patients was 81, and they were cared for on the LCP for an average of 33 hours before death.

10/14/09 3 Of 5 times of London Robert Reich hhhhhhhhhh Obama adviser. He is the Kook not me. Euthanasia of old people is happening in EU and proposed here. The audit found that 88 per cent were prescribed drugs in anticipation of the symptoms or pain that they may develop as they neared death. A total of 83 per cent of patients either did not need intravenous medication or fluids or had them withdrawn because they were judged to be doing more harm than good, while 37 per cent were given sedatives. Mostly these were given in low doses, but the trusts prescribing relatively high doses regularly need to review their practice, the audit adds. At least 40 per cent of patients were reported as being aware that they were dying, but details were not available for another 39 per cent. Although relatives or carers were informed of the plan of care in 72 per cent of cases, and told that the patient had entered the dying phase in 76 per cent of cases, there is still room for improvement. Professor John Ellershaw, director of the Marie Curie institute, said that the pathway was used when a clinical team led by a senior doctor felt they could no longer cure a patient, but could make them more comfortable. However, the guidelines were never intended as a one-way street towards death and did not recommend continuous deep sedation or the withdrawal of fluids or medication. Patients should be reassessed every four hours. Before the LCP, palliative care specialists were often called when a patient was dying, only to find relatives confused, angry and distressed, he added. That three quarters of relatives and carers are now told whats going on is encouraging, but we dont know whats happening in the remaining cases. He added that patients and their carers should be offered spiritual or psychological support, for example from a priest or counsellor, if they wanted it. The audit found that a patients spiritual needs were reported as being assessed in only 30 per cent of cases. End-of-life care was the cause of more than half of NHS complaints about acute hospital care between 2004 and 2006. The Marie Curie Cancer Care charity welcomed the findings but called for patients and carers to be better informed and consulted on decisions made by doctors and nurses, and said that extra funding promised by the Government for palliative care needed to be properly ring-fenced. Jonathan Potter, director of clinical standards at the Royal College of Physicians, who was also involved in the audit, said: Much improvement is required within busy hospital schedules for communication with and support for relatives. If we can get this right, it would make a huge difference to patients and their families. Joyce Robins, of the campaign group Patient Concern, said she was reassured by a new version of the pathway. We were very concerned that the LCP had been oversimplistic, a tick-box list of symptoms to say people were dying, she said. But the new version is transformed and is so much better. If it is rolled out and applied properly across the NHS, there would be nowhere to hide for healthcare staff who didnt follow it.

Robert Reich Reveals Brutal Health Care Truths; MSM Snores

By P.J. Gladnick (Bio | Archive)October 13, 2009 - 17:54 ET Paging Congressman Alan Grayson! Here is a quote that validates what you said about those EVIL Republicans: "We're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die." Aha! So it turns out that Grayson was right when he said "Republicans want you to die quickly." Only one "little" problem here. That quote did not come from a Republican. In fact it came from the very liberal former Labor Secretary Robert Reich who is now an economics adviser for Barack Obama.

In an audio recording from a September 2007 speech to an audience at the UC Berkeley, Reich reveals what he believes an honest liberal presidential candidate would say about health care. The "truth" about health care as Reich sees it is quite shocking and as you can hear on the recording, he is definitely not kidding. Here is a transcript of the brutal truth about health care as Robert Reich sees it: I'll actually give you a speech made up entirely, almost on the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what a candidate should say if we were in the kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship and they were educated in terms of what the issues were and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them: "Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that's true and what I'm going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people...you're going to have to pay more. "Thank you. And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die." Are you taking notes, Alan Grayson? Okay, now back to Robert Reich and his uncomfortably brutal honesty about health care. "Also I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of

Medicare, Medicaid---we already have a lot of bargaining leverage---to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents. Thank you." And thank you, Robert Reich, for revealing the brutal truth about what liberals ultimately have in store for the public with their health care plan. Remember, this is Reich presenting what an honest liberal presidential candidate would say aloud if he weren't worried about being elected. This recording has already gone viral in the blogosphere but so far the mainstream media is ignoring it. I guess the MSM is currently much more obsessed over what Rush Limbaugh did not say about slavery than they are over what an Obama economics adviser actually did say about health care. An oatmeal cookie! An oatmeal cookie to the first intrepid MSM reporter to ask Robert Reich about his 2007 quote! And, please, don't let Reich try to wiggle out by claiming he was just joking. As you can hear, he was dead serious in presenting the brave new world of ObamaCare. And all you old people awaiting the results of the health care bill in Congress..."we're going to let you die." H/T: Verum Serum P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.