The Liverpool Care Pathway has become a checklist for killing. This is what happens when a country allows bureaucrats to control healthcare. (Yes, I am issuing an unsubtle warning about Obamacare.)
The Pathway was designed by health bureaucrats to fix a real problem: Too many patients were being allowed to die in pain in UK hospitals. In centralized systems, the answer to a problem is always more technocracy. So, the Liverpool Care Pathway was put into place to ensure that dying patients receive adequate pain control, including in the rare instances that it is necessary, sedation.
But rather than being patient-centered, it became a bureaucratic nightmare: Patient elderly or dying: Check. Pathway instituted whether the patient requires it or not: Check. It got so bad that some who weren’t dying have been sedated and dehydrated to death....