“Britain’s Central Planning Death Panels”

From EconoLog,
Britain’s Central Planning Death Panels; David Henderson explains what he means by that:

Why do I use the term “Central Planning” in the title? Because that’s what the policy is. Doctors use their information, along with a centrally planned protocol, to make decisions. Just as in the Soviet Union, the true customer is not the patient. The patient pays an incremental fee of zero and, therefore, has little economic clout. The true customer is the government, which is trying to conserve resources and, thus, making tradeoffs among various patients.

What is Henderson referring to?

This:
Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve

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.
…
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died in a nursing home in July 2008 from a brain tumour, said: “When she was started on the [plan] her medication was withdrawn.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.”

Think it can’t happen here?

You are wrong.

Once you have a one-payor system, the system will have strict protocols dictating who gets to live. Elderly patients consume the largest amount of healthcare dollars in any society. It follows that decreasing their numbers will make economic sense. From there to the graveyard is only a nanosecond.

Even now Lawmakers eye Medicare trims to pay for health overhaul, and they haven’t even started yet.