To United Nations, Old Lives Don’t Matter

01 Jun, 2015 by Dave Blount

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What could be worse than the death panels implicit in socialized medicine? Only one thing: death panels where it isn’t your government that choses who lives and who dies, but the malign and unaccountable United Nations. Once again the UK is a step ahead of us on the road to healthcare utopia, and offers an indication of where we are heading:

The NHS could be led to discriminate against the over 70s to meet ‘highly unethical’ UN health targets which seek to reduce premature deaths in younger people, senior medics have warned.

Under the proposed Sustainable Development Goals, UN member states will be given targets to cut the number of deaths from diseases like cancer, stroke, diabetes and dementia by one third by 2030.

However because many are age-related illnesses people who succumb to those diseases from the age of 70 are not deemed to have died prematurely and so are not included in the target.

In an open letter published in The Lancet, an international group of ageing specialists say the new guideline sends out the message that health provision for younger groups must be prioritised at the expense of older people.

Prof Peter Lloyd-Sherlock, professor of social policy and international development at the University of East Anglia, and lead author of the letter, said: “This premature mortality target is highly unethical, since it unjustifiably discriminates against older people.” …

Baroness Sally Greengross, former director of Age Concern England who also signed the letter said: “If adopted, this UN target could lead to institutionalised discrimination against older people in health care, both here in the UK and globally.”

The UN targets will impose pressure to double down on an alarming phenomenon that British socialize medicine has already produced:

Last year the Royal College of Surgeons warned that elderly people are being denied life-saving operations because of age discrimination within the NHS. …

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice [great acronym for a death panel]), was also criticised for attempting to change its funding criteria to take into account “wider societal benefits” when deciding on whether to fund drugs.

The pointy-headed progressive masterminds in charge know better than we do how long we should live.